The Countdown to the restart of the economy has begun.

[Darren]

" (CNN)Beaches and parks in Jacksonville, Florida, reopened Friday afternoon as more states consider easing restrictions put in place to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
Crowds at Jacksonville Beach cheered when the barriers came down on the beach, according to CNN affiliate WJXT."

"https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/us/jacks ... index.html"

[Scooter]

Those were the beaches that scientists were clamoring should have been closed at least a month before they were, because they were obviously a breeding ground for transmission to people who would they be travelling back to wherever they lived.

[Econoline]

From Adam-Troy Castro (on Facebook):

The thing is, we recognized this particular mental illness decades ago.

General Buck Turgidson, played by George C. Scott in DR STRANGELOVE, assured the President that nuclear war wouldn't be such a bad thing. We would, he said, lose thirty or forty million people. Tops.

Tops.

"I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed," he said, dismissively.

I have heard that argument from other hawks. It was prevalent rhetoric for decades, not an exaggeration at all. And the thing is, honestly, the thing is: they never imagined themselves as among the thirty or forty million. Nor anyone they care about.

All the people who like to imagine themselves being on top during the zombie apocalypse are (excuse me) dead certain that they would be the guy with a baseball bat, busting zombie heads. They don't picture themselves among the shambling. This is not universal; I know for a fact that I would die on day one. It is not wish-fulfillment, for me. I like the stories. But I don't think, gee, I myself will be just fine.

Now, all those guys, Trumpians mostly, who are "willing to take" two percent of the population dying if that means we can still pick up roof shingles at Home Depot, who want schools opened up, who think that old people need to take their hit for the team, all those guys...I guarantee you that the 2% mortality rate they shrug off does not include themselves, or anybody they love. I also tell you that some people who defied the quarantine to show themselves above it all have already learned the contrary lesson the hard way, some of them after expressing their defiance so angrily that it is hard to see their subsequent flattening by the concrete realities of the universe as anything but Karma.

They are willing to sacrifice the unseen, hypothetical other. They do not see themselves in the cross-hairs. And why would they? The arrogance that accompanies the syndrome is the certainty that this is all a movie, and that they are the stars of it. The rest of us are redshirts, the guys who just showed up this episode so Captain Kirk can tell them to investigate that grinding noise behind the rock. We're supposed to die. Our very purpose in life is dying to show how bad the menace of the week is, so that Captain Kirk later looks more awesome.

Not them. Never them.

This is denial to the point of mental illness.

[Bicycle Bill]

Someone whispered in your Fuhrer's ear that his blustering about his "absolute power" is as flaccid as his microscopic dick.

The surprising part is that Herr Trumpler listened.....

-"BB"-

[Scooter]

Trump and His Allies Are Worried About More Than November

In the face of mass unemployment and a rapidly contracting economy, President Trump is desperate to end the pandemic lockdown and bring the country back on line. That’s why he spent the past week asserting his “total” authority to reopen the economy (“The president of the United States calls the shots”) and promising a rapid return to normal: “Our country has to get open, and it will get open, and it’ll get open safely and hopefully quickly — some areas quicker than others,” he said on Tuesday.

Republicans in Congress, likewise, are urging an end to the freeze. “It should have happened yesterday,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, chairman of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus, told Politico. Representative Trey Hollingsworth of Indiana acknowledged the chance of “loss of life” from an early end to social distancing but asserted, nonetheless, that it was better than the alternative. “It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils,” he said to a local radio station. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was even more blunt during an interview on Fox News on Wednesday. “We gotta reopen, and when we do, the coronavirus is going to spread faster, and we got to be ready for it.”

No doubt there is real concern for the economic and health consequences of an extended shutdown. But Republicans, and Trump in particular, are also thinking about November. If the president knows anything, it’s that his fate rises and falls with the state of the economy. And if he loses his campaign for re-election, then in this polarized environment of nationalized politics, he’s likely to take congressional Republicans down with him.

But I think there’s another element underlying the push to reopen the economy despite the threat it poses to American lives, a dynamic beyond partisanship that explains why much of the conservative political ecosystem, from politicians and donors to activists and media personalities, has joined the fight to end the lockdown.

To even begin to tackle this crisis, Congress had to contemplate policies that would be criticized as unacceptably radical under any other circumstances. At $2.2 trillion, the initial relief package was a bill that was more than twice the size of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in 2009. Further aid is almost certainly forthcoming, and Democrats, at least, are contemplating trillions more in additional stimulus, including universal basic income for the duration of the crisis, a COBRA expansion that would cover 100 percent of health care costs for laid-off and furloughed workers and a proposal to cover payrolls for nearly every business in America. On top of all of this, the Federal Reserve is flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in rescue loans and bond purchases, to stabilize markets and keep interest rates low.

In one short month, the United States has made a significant leap toward a kind of emergency social democracy, in recognition of the fact that no individual or community could possibly be prepared for the devastation wrought by the pandemic. Should the health and economic crisis extend through the year, there’s a strong chance that Americans will move even further down that road, as businesses shutter, unemployment continues to mount and the federal government is the only entity that can keep the entire economy afloat.

But this logic — that ordinary people need security in the face of social and economic volatility — is as true in normal times as it is under crisis. If something like a social democratic state is feasible under these conditions, then it is absolutely possible when growth is high and unemployment is low. And in the wake of two political campaigns — Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s — that pushed progressive ideas into the mainstream of American politics, voters might begin to see this essential truth.

If the electoral danger for the Republican Party is that voters will blame the president for high unemployment and mass death — a reasonable fear, given how Trump loudly denied the threat in the face of warnings from inside and outside his administration — then the ideological danger is that it undermines the ideological project that captured the state with President Ronald Reagan and is on the path to victory under Donald Trump.

Republicans haven’t openly expressed this, but they seem aware of it, to the extent that on the eve of approval of the first coronavirus bill, they tried to kill the most generous provisions of relief — an enormous expansion of unemployment insurance. The reason? “The moment we go back to work, we cannot create an incentive for people to say, ‘I don’t need to go back to work because I can do better someplace else,’” Senator Rick Scott of Florida explained on the Senate floor. In other words, we cannot help people so much that they can effectively bargain for better wages; crisis or not, we must discipline the working class.

There’s no guarantee that Americans will respond to the pandemic and economic collapse with support for more and greater assistance from the federal government. But the possibility is there and it will become more apparent the longer this continues. If the rolling depressions of the late 19th century disrupted the social order enough to open the space for political radicalism — from the agrarian uprising of the Farmers’ Alliance to the militant agitation of the industrial labor movement — then the one-two punch of the Great Recession and the Pandemic Depression might do the same for us.

In which case, it makes all the sense in the world for Trump, the Republican Party and the conservative movement to push for the end of the lockdown, public health be damned. After years of single-minded devotion, the conservative movement is achingly close to dismantling the New Deal political order and turning the clock back to when capital could act without limits or restraints.

But in trying to destroy the administrative state — in trying to make government small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” — conservatives left the country vulnerable to a deadly disease that has undermined that project and galvanized its opponents.

And all of this is happening as one of the most progressive generations in history begins to take its place in our politics, its views informed by two decades of war and economic crisis.

Yes, nothing is set in stone and, yes, events still have to unfold. But at this moment in American life, it feels as if one movement, a reactionary one, is beginning to unravel and another, very different in its outlook, is beginning to take shape.

[Econoline]

" (CNN)Beaches and parks in Jacksonville, Florida, reopened Friday afternoon as more states consider easing restrictions put in place to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
Crowds at Jacksonville Beach cheered when the barriers came down on the beach, according to CNN affiliate WJXT."

"https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/us/jacks ... index.html"

[Joe Guy]

The good news is the beach goers are probably infected Trump supporters.

[Lord Jim]

The good news is the beach goers are probably infected Trump supporters.

Well, it would be good news if the only ones these fools were endangering were themselves; unfortunately they will likely go on to infect may innocent people...(The saddest and most angering thing I've seen are the pictures of all the young children that these ignorant Trumpanzee parents are dragging to these "we want to risk death" protests. In saner times, these parents would all be getting visits from their local child welfare offices...)

Though as a result of his exhortations, and the insular, isolated, and fearful tribal lifestyles of many of his supporters, he will likely be killing a larger percentage of his supporters than those of his opponents (Though of course he will be killing both.)

[Scooter]

[Scooter]

[Scooter]

Wisconsin extends safer-at-home order to May 26

[Lord Jim]

I see where mass murder advocate Laura Ingraham, apparently disappointed that California isn't killing enough of its people, is making repeated calls for the state to drop all coronavirus restrictions...

Fortunately, her pleas to prematurely remove the life-saving restrictions that have been so instrumental in keeping the Covid-19 death count so much better than that of other large population states will fall on deaf ears. California is the most populous state in the country with a population of about 40 million, but just passed the 1000 total death mark and has seven states with higher death totals.

This relative success has been directly due to the early imposition of effective shutdown, shelter-at home and social distancing orders by local and state officials, and even more importantly by the conscientious following of these rules by the overwhelming majority of the state's citizens.

Unfortunately, I'm sure that in a state this size we'll eventually see some of those idiotic death-wish Trumpanzee protestors...(maybe gathering in Sacramento or on some SoCal beaches)

[Darren]

"(CNN) -- Walmart is hiring 50,000 new workers, after hitting its previous goal of hiring 150,000 new employees more than six weeks ahead of schedule.

The company announced Friday the new hires for temporary or part-time positions gives Walmart the "opportunity to provide additional staffing in key areas where it's needed most," including at its stores, fulfillment and distribution centers.

The workers are needed to satisfy customers' insatiable demand for household goods and groceries, as most of the nation is under shelter-in-place restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. Walmart is America's largest grocer and one of the few big-box retailers that remain open."

https://www.fox5vegas.com/news/us_world ... JlYKKl36vc

[Darren]

"(Bloomberg) -- In Fargo, North Dakota, cheap fuel has never been so unwelcome.

The Midwestern city is so awash in gasoline, the fuel last week sold for a record 12 cents a gallon at the rack -- its last stop before the pump. In better times, the price dip would be a boon for gas station owners looking to snag low-cost supplies. But with fewer customers every day, gas pumps are becoming little more than makeshift storage for ballooning inventories."

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/gaso ... 00541.html

[Scooter]

Yeah, if there was ever a sign that the economy is roaring ahead, it's 12 cents per gallon gasoline.

[Scooter]

[Lord Jim]

[Darren]

Yeah, if there was ever a sign that the economy is roaring ahead, it's 12 cents per gallon gasoline.

You missed the point, Ava.

Cheap gas means people living paycheck to paycheck can take minimum wage jobs because they can now afford the transportation or the child care.

We had a lot of unfilled job openings before the mediademic.

The upshot is more that want to work, can work once the governors bestow their consent on their subjects.

[Scooter]

As soon as the economy gets going again, cheap gasoline vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

[BoSoxGal]

37,079 dead in the USA as of yesterday. In 6 weeks. And probably thousands more not properly identified as covid19 COD.

Time to open up!