For some reason, unknown to me, I get about five emails a day from Trump asking for money, and, so far, I’ve only gotten one email from Battlin’ Joe Biden. Just one email, not just one email asking for money, just one email (although that was asking for money). I thought I’m on every Democratic email list in existence, I get emails from Dr. Arati Kreibich – whom, I’m told, is a progressive Councilwoman running for New Jersey’s 5th Congressional District – I get several emails a day from AOC and Rashida Talib, I get emails from Kara Eastman, candidate for Congress in Nebraska’s 2nd District, I even get emails from Steve Bullock. Hell, I get a couple of emails a day from Nancy Pelosi, but, somehow, I don’t seem to be on Joe’s list.

However, comparing that one email of Joe’s to Trump’s emails is kinda interesting .

From Joe: Hi Steve, The Democratic Primary is at a boiling point. We can take on Donald Trump, unite the country, and win the White House, but I urgently need your help.
Can you rush a donation to my Democratic campaign and Brady PAC today?
Chip in $5 right away >>
Trump and the NRA are tearing our country apart. Every day, 100 people die from gun violence in America. And in the face of constant bloodshed, Trump bows down to the NRA. That’s why I’m so proud to stand with Brady PAC in the fight to end gun violence. We can really beat Trump and end the NRA and gun industry’s stranglehold on Washington. But the NRA is DESPERATE. They’ll spend millions to save Trump. So I need you to dig deep and support Brady PAC and my campaign.
Can you spare $5, $25, or more? Click to donate >>

Now three from the Trump campaign: Steve, I just got off the phone with President Trump. I don’t email you often, so you know this is critical. The President specifically asked me to check in with you because the April End-of-Month Deadline is coming up and we are pacing a little behind our $5,000,000 Goal. It’s going to be Trump vs. Biden on the ballot in November, and we need to make sure every Patriot is stepping up and doing their part to secure FOUR MORE YEARS. President Trump is counting on you to help us CRUSH our goal, and he’s asked me to let him know the moment that you make your contribution. Your support is so important that he’s even agreed to extend your TRIPLE-MATCH offer until 11:59 PM TONIGHT.
Please contribute ANY AMOUNT before 11:59 PM TONIGHT to help us CRUSH our End-of-Month Goal and your gift will be TRIPLE-MATCHED.

CROOKED HILLARY ENDORSES SLEEPY JOE
Did you hear the news Steve? Sleepy Joe Biden just racked up some new endorsements for President of the United States.
First (and shortest), Mini Mike Bloomberg endorsed Biden.
Next, Crazy Bernie was forced to drop out and endorse Biden.
Then, Cheatin’ Obama (after waiting 355 days) endorsed his former VP, Biden.
After that, Nervous Nancy endorsed Biden.
And just yesterday, Crooked Hillary endorsed Biden.
The Liberals are uniting behind their pathetic candidate to try and take me down, and more importantly, to take YOU down.
We have a crucial goal coming up TOMORROW, and now that Sleepy Joe has FIVE key Democrat endorsements, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before…
For the NEXT HOUR, all contributions made to our critical $5,000,000 End-of-Month Goal will be not 3, not 4, but 5X-MATCHED!

Steve, We just pulled your April End-of-Month Deadline Donor File:
Supporter: Steve Stern
End-of-Month Gift: MISSING.
We wanted to reach out because we just got off a call with President Trump to review the most recent list of Patriots who contributed to our critical $5,000,000 April End-of-Month Goal, and he noticed your name was STILL MISSING.
There’s only one more day left to contribute to our End-of-Month Goal, and President Trump is counting on his BEST supporters, like YOU, to step up.
This deadline is too important to sit on the sidelines, so the President has activated a special TRIPLE-MATCH on all donations to help us CRUSH our $5,000,000 goal.
Please contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to help us CRUSH our April End-of-Month Goal and your gift will be TRIPLE-MATCHED. >>
 

For a palate cleanser, here is an email from AOC – sigh – who is being challenged at the primary level:

Steve, I said this from the start: when you speak truth to power, power fights back.
Did you know that a corporate dark money group is bankrolling one of our opponents? They’re misleadingly named U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and they’re focused on propping up conservative, right-wing candidates. They’re coming for me because I call out corrupt Wall Street bailout schemes. So Steve, if you can afford it, I’m asking you to help show that our fight for working families – and against corruption – is here to stay. Make a contribution to our re-election campaign right now.
If you’ve stored your info with ActBlue Express, we’ll process your contribution instantly:

I’ve been saying that I don’t know anybody who has come down with COVID-19, let alone anybody who has died, but that is a foolish thing to say. I guess what is safe to say is that nobody who I’ve talked to in the last couple of days has had COVID-19 but that leaves a passel of people who might be affected. One of the passel is Heather Amber, an old grammar school friend of my daughter’s, and who pops up on my feed every once in a great while. Yesterday, she said this:

I wanted to call this poem Life After COVID, but I wasn’t tested until a month after coming down with the illness which still leaves me struggling to breathe weeks after the long fever ended, and the test was negative, making me unsure what to call the worst experience of my life. I’m guessing there are countless others with stories similar to mine. If you’re one of them, I hope this poem gives you comfort.⁣
⁣

Life After
Though these heavy lungs,
tight as drums, mean
I can’t do
much of anything,
I can still hear
the birds singing.
I can still see
the lemon tree dancing
outside my window.
I can still feel
the safe embrace
of my bed. And
I can still love
this life completely.

Heather Ambler

“China will do anything they can to have me lose this race,” Trump said, citing its handling of the crisis as proof. Business Insider, May 1, 2020

There is, apparently, a rumor going around that the Chinese manufactured the coronavirus in a secret military lab in an effort to get rid of President Trump. I say apparently because I haven’t actually read or heard anybody actually say the rumor, I’ve only heard people referring to it to say the theory is absurd. I have also heard that the President believes and has repeated the rumor. I don’t understand that. I would think that Trump would aggressively deny that anybody manufactured this virus to make him look bad.

Think about it.

If the Chinese made this virus in a lab to make President Trump look bad, they had to be certain that he would, in fact, end up looking bad; they had to be certain that he would do a terrible job of coping with the problem. If he had done a superb job, or even a good job, he would have been a hero. The President is saying, in effect, that “The Chinese knew I would be incapable of handling a real crisis so they created one to make me look bad.”

Why would he say that?

In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear and despair. John Kelly in The Great Mortality, and quoted by Talia Lavin in CQ Magazine.

…but Zoom has changed everything and I feel much less isolated for it.

First, some numbers as of the morning of April 28. There are 1,002,498 known cases of COVID-19 in the US with over 57 thousand deaths. New York still is the hot spot with 295,106 cases and 22,668 deaths while California has dropped to the fifth hardest-hit state with 45,219 cases and 1,795 deaths. On March 17, San Mateo has 64 cases and two deaths and today we have 1,099 cases and 141 deaths, so I think we are doing pretty good, considering. The Six San Francisco Bay Area counties, with about seven million people, were in the first group of counties to quarantine – and one of the first groups of government entities to work together – and it seems to have worked. If you are interested in more detail, the New Yorker has a fascinating article on the difference between the reaction on the East Coast and West Coast which has resulted in wildly different results.

Even before the coronavirus quarantine, Michele and I watched a lot of TV, and, as you can imagine, we are watching even more now. After a while, all that TV runs together, that is not to say that it isn’t good, much of it is good, some is excellent, but after a while, it does all run together. Still, every once in a while something stands out and for me right now, the one that stands out is Unbelievable. It is a true story about tracking down a serial raper that fits in with my belief that men have pretty much fucked up their self-assigned role of running the world and it is time for women to take over. Unbelievable stars Kaitlyn Dever, who I first saw as the old beyond her years Loretta McCready in Justified, Toni Collette, who was the ditzy mother in About a Boy, and Merritt Wever, who I have seen many times but she is so good each time seemed different.

Unbelievable is really two stories, interwoven but separate, one takes place in Washington, near Seattle, and the other is in Colorado and features two terrific women detectives and is the main story. After the first episode which starts with the rape of a young woman, played by Kaitlyn Dever, and is hard to watch mostly because of the mishandling – and mishandling is a gross understatement – of the subsequent case by a male detective and his male boss. The second episode starts three years later and features Toni Collette and Merritt Wever doing the kind of job the men didn’t do three years earlier and I spent most of the remaining episodes wanting them to become one story. The difference between the professionalism of the women and unprofessionalism – for lack of a better word – of the men is stunning (and it is an actual, true, real, story). Check it out.

On the women should run the world front, I would also recommend Long Shot. It is a RomCom, starring Charlize Theron as a Secretary of State getting ready to run for president and Seth Rogen as…uh…Seth Rogan. it is a much more subversive movie than it first appears. Also on the women should run the world is a list of best-action-movies in Glamour. When I clicked through to the list, I realized that they were all woman-centric and I wanted to pass it off as a gimmick except that the first movie was Mad Max: Fury Road which should be on the top of anybody’s best action-movie list (to double-check, a random search gave me #25 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, 44 Edge of Tomorrow with Emily Blunt and #9 V for Vendetta with a shaved head Natalie Portman).

One of the programs we watched and liked was Unorthodox, which also featured a female protagonist. and it answered a question that I’ve long wondered about. Why do Orthodox Jews dress like they still live in a shtetl in 1895 Eastern Europe? I was brought up in the exact opposite manner, “assimilate, look and act like everybody else, blend in…”. The Jewish Orthodox community in New York does not want to assimilate because they believe God brought on the Holocaust, the Shoa, because the Jews were losing their specialness, their Jewish separateness as the Chosen People. Most of the New York Orthodox community are Holocaust survivors or descendants of Holocaust survivors and their attitude seems to be, we’re never going to do that again. I don’t agree, obviously, but it is a coherent theory so I feel a little better. As an aside, I am aware that during the 1920s through the early 30s, the Jewish Community in Germany was one of the most assimilated Jewish populations in the world and it did them no good and may have contributed to the Holocaust (but that is a data point I choose to ignore). End aside.

A couple of days ago, President Trump Tweeted LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL! and my first thought was “Clueless Trump, surely he was around when saying that about Vietnam became a joke because we heard it so often.” I wondered why he would say something so tainted with failure. It must be because he is stressed and frantic. He should be stressed and frantic, after all, the pressure on him is horrendous. It is unimaginable really, and Trump, the perpetual optimist, and promoter, is desperately trying to find some light somewhere. But we are still nearer the beginning of this collective nightmare than the end. To be fair to Trump, he is in an impossible situation, we are expecting the Federal Government to come in and save us and it might have been able to do that if the disaster were confined to one area, like Sandy or Katrina. But it isn’t, the whole country is under siege at the same time and it is impossible for the Federal Government to back up everyone everywhere and, short term at least, this is just going to get worse.

Still, President Trump’s leadership has been capricious at best, and, rather than becoming the lead agency, under Trump, the Federal Government is becoming irrelevant. To fill the void, local governments are banding together in regional alliances. These two maps show conditions only fourteen days apart, fourteen days in which it became apparent that the Feds were not going to be the cavalry riding in to rescue us.

This is what happens when there is no reliable National Leadership in a crisis, people and groups start banding together to find solutions. Leaders rise like cream in milk. Trump has said that he wanted to be President because the United States is no longer respected but, ironically, both internationally and domestically the United States is less respected today than it was four years ago. Sad.

We had our first takeout a couple of nights ago. It was from Fey – Michele’s favorite local Chinese restaurant (mine is Crouching Tiger) – I drove up in front of the restaurant, opened the trunk door with the remote button, the woman who is the maitre d’ during happier times came out to the street – wearing a mask and gloves – and put the food in back, then I drove home. The only connection to the outside world that I had was the bags full of tasty Chinese food including Chicken with Chestnuts, Fried Cumman Lamb, Green Onion Pancake, Cold Cucumber in Sichuan Spicy Sauce, and Beijing Eggplant (it had been a while since we had Chinese food and we wanted everything). I thought that getting takeout would be sort of the equivalent to going out, but it is more, it is a way of saying “We want you to stay in business, this will end”.

I think Trump’s current “No, I wasn’t being dangerously stupid and trying to kill Americans — I was just being dangerously glib about something that is already killing Americans” defense needs some work. #DontDrinkBleach Tweet by Mrs. Betty Bowers@BettyBowers, America’s best Christian.