It’s the end of my third week in quarantine and I’ve gotta admit folks, I’m starting to lose track of time. Mostly I’ve just been obsessively reading the news and playing a lot of Animal Crossing. But hey, at least one of those makes writing up this story a lot easier. (Though I will say playing Animal Crossing makes reading the news more tolerable so, it’s a give-and-take.) Anyway, enough of my rambling: Here’s what you might have missed this week.
The path to flipping the Senate—and ridding us of Mitch McConnell—starts in North Carolina
By David Nir
With the coronavirus pandemic bearing down on us and the nation in dire need of urgent congressional action, what did Sen. Mitch McConnell do? He sent the Senate home and went on vacation for a long weekend in Kentucky, accompanied by none other than Brett Kavanaugh.
While McConnell dallied—it took him five days to pass the House’s first coronavirus bill—the number of sick and dead grew, and our ability to flatten the all-important curve shrank. But McConnell doesn’t care: He was too busy swearing in another unqualified Trump judge.
That’s why we must have new leadership in the Senate as soon as possible, and we can start in North Carolina by electing Army veteran Cal Cunningham.
Mitch is a horrible, corrupt, inept, true villain and although all we can hope to do during a pandemic is take care of each other, maybe taking care of each other includes making sure he’s unemployed come next January. Please donate $3 now to help Cal Cunningham flip the Senate and boot Mitch McConnell.
The bucks, the deaths, the misery, the chaos, are 100% on Donald Trump
By Mark Sumner
The United States is in a very bad place in the novel coronavirus pandemic. With more cases than any other nation on the planet, health care systems under strain in cities across the nation, and a rising case fatality rate to accompany that growth, the outlook is nothing less than dire. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned, the U.S. could be looking at between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths related to COVID-19 before the primary pandemic is past. And there are reasons to believe those numbers may be optimistic.
No matter that Donald Trump says, that does not mean he did a “good job.” It means that, with months of warning and near-infinite resources, he did a worse job than every other government on the entire planet—a job so awful that when a decade from now someone is unlucky enough to think of Trump, this is what they will remember. This is all they will remember. There was a crisis, Trump failed the nation, and the cost was many, many times worse than 9/11.
It’s on him, and he needs to pay dearly for it come November.
Trump has the gall to insinuate that doctors and nurses want more masks so they can steal them
By Meteor Blades
“How do you go from 10 to 20, to 300,000—10 to 20,000 masks to 300,000—even though this is different? Something’s going on, and you ought to look into it, as reporters,” Trump said. “Where are the masks going—are they going out the back door? Somebody should probably look into that, because I just don’t see from a practical standpoint how that’s possible to go from that to that, and we have that happening in numerous places.”
That’s right, this hoax of a president, the nation’s faker-in-chief, who has failed to move whatever mountains it takes to get adequate quantities of personal protection equipment into the hands of the people who are risking their lives as they try to save others, has dared hint that they are requesting more masks than they need so they can steal them.
Senate Republicans have no excuse for their piss-poor coronavirus response. No excuse whatsoever
By Kerry Eleveld
As the U.S. death toll due to the novel coronavirus climbs, congressional Republicans want to make sure they aren't left holding the bag for the federal government's piss-poor response in the early days of the burgeoning crisis. This week, GOP lawmakers have been trying out a new excuse: impeachment. That's right—that moment when 52 of 53 Senate Republicans voted to acquit Donald Trump, ensuring he would be at the helm right as the country was facing a burgeoning public health crisis unlike any seen in decades.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gave their new excuse a test run on Tuesday during an interview with a conservative radio host, arguing impeachment had "diverted the attention of the government.” Later Tuesday, Trump himself shot that idea down, saying, “I don't think I would have done any better had I not been impeached." But after being singularly responsible for voting to keep the most incompetent president in history in charge of the federal response to a pandemic, Senate Republicans are pretty desperate to pin the blame on Democrats.
That’s all for this week, folks. What’s a story that you think did not get enough attention this week? Let me know below. Looking forward to talking to you in the comments below.