Asked yesterday what specifically his administration is doing to help schools reopen, Trump did not say anything. Instead, he demanded that schools reopen and claimed “the fall” is a long way away: “Well, we have a long time to think about the school stuff. Because, you know.” pic.twitter.com/owbeFKHA9l
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 8, 2020
Maybe it’s just different for parents who love their kids
— JIM (@JimDoran) July 8, 2020
In the first place, during a normal year, many schools would be reopening sometime in August, just a few weeks from now.
In the second place, even in a non-pandemic season, getting the infrastructure ready to do so takes more time than that.
In the third place, the GOP’s Dear Leader can demand schools open up, and no doubt some of his death cultists governors will do their best to schedule some kind of official reopening… but no parent with any other options is going to send their kid(s) off to a plague pit just because it would make the Oval Office Occupant’s marketing campaign look better. And those unfortunate or misguided parents who do send their kids back will inevitably spark new coronavirus hotspots, for the teachers and school staff and relatives if not the kids themselves. Even schools in functional democracies, like South Korea and Denmark, have run into problems despite rigorous efforts. And that’s assuming that enough teachers & staff are willing or desperate enough to play ‘rona roulette in the first place.
You’d think someone in the Republican administration would step up to explain these basics, but I guess the Trump Purge has advanced to the point where even those individuals whose careers are most at risk can’t even muster that much of an effort.
Absolutely, kids need to be in school! And parents need the ‘free child care’ that too many Americans assume is the only reason for public schools to exist, too. But this ain’t a tv show, and firmly announcing Make It So! at the imaginary machinery behind the stage sets isn’t gonna make it happen.
Asked what the administration’s specific plan is to support schools, re testing, tracing, PPE, etc., Pence says, “The plan is to continue to do what we have done from the very beginning.” He claims that is providing governors “whatever support they need.”
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 8, 2020
.@kaitlancollins asks why Trump is threatening to cut funding at a time schools need more. Pence: “First and foremost, it’s – what you heard from the president is just his determination to provide the kind of leadership…that says that we’re gonna get our kids back to school.”
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) July 8, 2020
Authentic Heartland(tm) gobbledygook, from the Emergency Backup Dear Leader. It’s a death cult, all the way down.
PaulWartenberg
I am taking trump’s threats at face value, because so few other officials have stepped up to tell him HELL NO. We are facing a health disaster of tragic proportions.
Just blogged aboot it.
Rick Smeltzer
Pence might as well say “I love lamp!” VP Brick Tamland to the rescue!
Brachiator
As always, Trump wants to make demands and idle threats. But he will not lift a finger to help. In return he wants praise for saving the day.
Maybe he will put Young Jared in charge of opening schools.
lgerard
You are not going to get any response form trump unless the stock market is threatened.
Then he will gather a bunch of ‘science guys” and put on a concern pageant for a few days
jonas
Narrator: “There was no plan.”
Baud
A better strategy would have been to take credit for solving school shootings.
dmsilev
That bad, huh?
dm
“The second wave: COVID hits Israel like a tsunami”
thedailybeast.com/the-second-wave-of-covid-hits-israel-like-a-tsunami
dmsilev
@Baud: Bulletproof PPE. Solve two problems at once.
Wyatt Salamanca
Damn straight and Trump sure as Hell ain’t no Jean-Luc Picard. He’s a sniveling, bed wetting, nail biting coward pretending to be Mr. Macho Man.
khead
So, Trump used a sharpie on the CDC guidelines.
dmsilev
Alexandra Petri:
jonas
What’s the over/under on that Lt. Gov. from Texas coming out in the next day or two and saying that the people in his state should be willing to sacrifice a few kids and teachers to support the economy?
Benw
Bold prediction: schools in the US will open this fall with some states being more careful than others and active hinderance from the Federal govt. Within a month they will all shut down again as even the safer reopenings cause infections to rise, states that open without restrictions will see infections soar, causing wave 1.3. Trump will screech and most of the burden will fall on teachers, students, parents and admins who were all doing their best but suddenly have to scramble without a great plan the way we did in March this year when schools had to shut down all in a rush.
bluehill
From TPM. Ugh.
SiubhanDuinne
Pretty much like his second-term plans, then.
ArchTeryx
p.a.
Their desire is to be a SELECTIVE death cult, but they’re the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Whacking their own, and the capo di tutti capi is a basket case.
Leto
@khead: A sharpie is a strange way to say that he pulled his pants down, defecated on the guidelines, smeared it all around, held it up as if he were so proud of his Shitcasso, told his aides, “OPEN SCHOOLS”, and then waddled off for more executive time. And no, he never pulled his pants back up.
hueyplong
So Pence says that Trump’s tweeted extortion threat (open or I cut funding) is “leadership.”
The only people who remain in the administration are all future defendants.
Baud
@bluehill:
So at worst, Trump has only saved 1.5 million people. Not bad for a corrupt real estate developer.
patrick Il
Trump Tweet :
He may he doing this out of petty jealousy . We can’t have these liberal, socialistic countries succeed where he has failed.
He has no idea that decisions they made months ago are why they can move forward now.
hueyplong
@patrick Il: Interesting, Sweden isn’t a place about which we’ve often heard there are no COVID problems.
MattF
See, there’s a pattern here. Trump and his ‘administration’ are failing. Again. Over and over again– so many times, in exactly the same way. Hard to ignore. “So, Johnny, what did you learn in school today?” “My teacher died.”
Hoodie
Our governor had originally indicated decision on schools on July 1, but delayed that because the numbers suck. My wife is a teacher, and we’re praying that he announces Option C — continue on line. From what I’ve heard, one of the things the threat of opening up is causing is a significant rise in parents applying for homeschooling status which, if granted, may take funds away from the schools, which is a wingnut wet dream. I know there are some good reasons for wanting them to open, but I’d rather the governor say no as the default and then think about how to deal with particularly at risk kids, kids with parents who are essential workers, etc.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@hueyplong:
Stealing this.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
@SiubhanDuinne: And the GOP healthcare plan. They’ve only had the thirty years since they killed Hillarycare to come up with an idea.
trollhattan
California labs are running low of COVID test materials and test result turnaround time is lagging.
Think about that for a second–we’ve been on lockdown since March and there still aren’t enough testing resources. It’s been FIVE MONTHS.
HumboldtBlue
I see someone filmed Cole out doing his exercise today.
raven
And the Illini upset the #1 seed Ohio State team in “The Basketball Tournament”!!!!
The Moar You Know
Every single word a lie. They are at best partially open, and killing both kids and teachers.
laura
Or the Government could make direct payments for people to stay home safe, support the economy and get a handle on the virus while plans are made for safe reopening. But instead we have “I alone can fix it/I bear no responsibility.” And those who still view him as a God among men will be the death of us all.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Leto:
The White House needs to stock up on diapers and Maalox to accommodate the Shitstainer in Chief.
misterpuff
@jonas: Would that be the Texas Lt. Governor who will be webexing into the TX GOP convention?
cain
@bluehill:
In their mind they are thinking – “hot dog, that’s probably 500k who will be off the govt dole – probably all minorities and old people!” Full steam ahead!
cain
@Hoodie: I’m curious does that whole ICE thing where they send students back if it is online – does that affect high school students or grade schoolers who might be here on exchange visas?
patrick Il
@hueyplong:
” Keeping schools open worked in Sweden” at Axios tells the story.
I’m on my cell and can’t do links .
Patricia Kayden
hueyplong
@Comrade Scrutinizer: From this point forward, it’s part of their titles, e.g., Future Defendant Betsy DeVos, Future Defendant Mike Pence, Future Defendant Kellyanne Conway, etc., etc.
Patricia Kayden
@laura: The irony is if Trump had done the right thing from the get go (order everyone to stay home, wear masks and socially distance while providing healthcare workers with protective equipment), we would be reopening SAFELY like Europe and Canada. Instead he called the Coronavirus a Democratic hoax so here we are.
Cheryl Rofer
bluehill
@ArchTeryx:
@Baud:
I wonder if there will be a tipping point in overall public perception about how bad this really is. When do people start to really panic? Because it seems to me that the general attitude is pretty cavalier. Of course some places and groups are worse than others.
hueyplong
@Cheryl Rofer: “The White House is discussing ways to tie federal funding for schools to the pace of their reopening plans as part of a Phase 4 stimulus bill.”
Much better phrasing for the extortion.
John S.
My wife is a middle school science teacher. In Florida.
I’ll be damned if she’s going to risk her life for these a$$holes.
patrick Il
@The Moar You Know:
I think it’s more bullshit than lie. Yes they’re open, after that he doesn’t know or care. He just doesn’t like the idea that someone might think they are more successful than he is.
Another Scott
@dm: Unpossible.
Cheers,
Scott.
gene108
What I do not understand about the rich Republicans, who started goading people into the reopen protests, the rich Republicans in Congress, and state government is how they totally ignored the most fucking basic most common sense cause and effect correlation out there: Get the virus under control, and only then can you get the economy under control.
Somebody in the DeVoss or Mercer families must have half clue about economics, and business.
But they pushed hard to reopen. I really want to go into a conspiracy rabbit hole as to why they did. Other than COVID19 hurts blacks, and Latinos more than whites, and therefore reduces “those people”, at a greater rate, I am hard pressed to think of one.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Wyatt Salamanca: Not mention Picard is only approving a plan his subordinates put together and are ready to implement.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jonas: I am sure telling all those Boomer grandparents they should happily sacrifice lives of their beloved grandkids for the pownage of the libertard will go over well.
Mike in NC
Alexandra Petri has another amusing piece in WaPo entitled, “We Can’t Wait for Schools to Reopen Safely!” One commenter noted that now that our kids have become used to school shootings, they just need to learn to take their chances with viral infections.
gene108
@HumboldtBlue:
Cannot be JGC
The man in the video did not injure himself
Another Scott
@trollhattan: Testing supplies are kinda specialized – one could imagine there being a necessary ramp-up time to meet demand.
Maybe.
But have you tried to buy nitrile gloves recently?
E.g. at McMaster-Carr – “We are experiencing unusually high demand for this item. Availability is uncertain, so we are not accepting orders at this time.”
For nitrile gloves. Not even sterile ones.
It can only be intentional actions by Donnie’s administration that prevent even basics not being available in the US nearly 4 months after a global pandemic was declared (and ~ 6 months after we knew about it in China). We have a Defense Production Act for circumstances like these and Donnie is refusing to use it.
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
I didn’t even know this was a thing.
Another Scott
@gene108: Yup.
Adam Serwer at TheAtlantic (from May):
The timing was no coincidence.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ken
Yes, but they’re dead now, and the current ones are the second or third generation.
catclub
The Democrats will fall in love with this idea.
Ksmiami
@PaulWartenberg: the only solution is tumbrels and scaffolding for this murderous administration
daveNYC
I think the post’s author is being optimistic about the number of parents who have better options. Companies are starting to demand that their employees come back to the office, and between many households being reliant on two incomes and the ludicrously high cost of child care, parents are going to be forced to send their kids back to school because the alternative is financial ruin.
Calouste
@The Moar You Know: Norway has had fewer COVID-19 cases this whole year than Florida just added yesterday.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: I’m waiting for a good write-up, which given the length may take a while, but I like what I’m seeing about health care
And postal banking! A long way from a platform to legislation, but I like where they’re starting
Captain C
@Brachiator:
Along with walking away from debts, pretty much his entire negotiation and business strategy. Well, unless you count the money laundering and other such illegalities.
trnc
Whoa, hold on there with the super thick policy wonk talk there, Al Gore.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@daveNYC:
What happened to the office-less future that was being touted as a result of the pandemic?
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It sounds promising, but it makes me weep when I think about what might have been.
JMG
@Cheryl Rofer: Are they on crack? That won’t ever fly in the House. Neither will Mitch’s liability waiver. Pelosi will just sit there, saying little, until the next 1000 point drop in the Dow brings Trump to the table with a white flag.
Cheryl Rofer
I don’t understand the Republicans at all. They are on the way to half a million deaths, the health care system wrecked, and a major depression.
Maybe they really do believe that flogging people back to work will save the economy.
I’ve said it before, but I like to see an endgame that I’m working toward. Right now the Republicans are hellbent toward a major disaster. I don’t get it.
Kay
@daveNYC:
It’s not just that. Tens of millions of children in “childcare” all day is worse than putting them in school.
The only reason anyone can afford childcare at all is because it’s done in groups. Are people imaging babysitters going to each household? Because that’s not how it works.
Also- there’s not a lot of extra capacity. We can’t just add 20 million school age children to the babies and preschoolers who are already there all day. Areas have daycare available according to need and hours, as everyone who has ever added their name to 10 wait lists can attest.
There are two choices. Subsidize one adult to stay home in each household with children under 12 or start pouring money into schools like it’s an emergency to get them ready. Because it is an emergency.
Kay
@daveNYC:
And daycare capacity is down. It might be as much as halved, because they’re distancing. There was going to be a daycare capacity problem independent of schools already.
These two groups have to move together. If adults go back to work, children must also go somewhere. They move together or not at all.
Kay
It would be cheaper to subsidize 20 million parents to stay home, but of course that’s just daycare. We’d still have the “education problem”.
This is a difficult problem. I’m not sure Karen Pence can solve it.
Another Scott
@Cheryl Rofer: They have no imagination. They cannot conceive of a world where liberal experts are correct, where politics and spin and lies cannot trump reality, where old white men are not in charge forever and always.
They think that Frank Luntz (or someone similar) will come up with some magic incantation to use in some TV commercials, they’ll win re-election, and everything will be back to the same as it always was.
They don’t know what real life is like anymore. They only talk to and hang out with lobbyists, drinking $350 bottles of wine.
I’m convinced it’s nothing more than that.
I hope that reality makes herself known in a big way on November 3.
Cheers,
Scott.
Feathers
@patrick Il: The problem is we don’t know if it worked. Unfortunately, Sweden decided to fuck the world over and refused to let researchers study the schools that they kept open. They’ve had outbreaks in schools and had to close some, but did not do any testing or tracking of students. Also, because student privacy laws allow other parents to be notified about a student only if there is “risk of death” to their fellow students. Since kids don’t seem to be dying of COVID, no one else was notified about students and teachers who became ill. How Sweden wasted a ‘rare opportunity’ to study coronavirus in schools
I more than understand how and why we have medical privacy laws, but they really seem to be fvcking us over when it comes to a global pandemic. You are required to wear masks on the MBTA. However, if you have a disability, you don’t have to, and drivers are not allowed to ask if you have a disability. Truly a nightmare.
Jeffro
Pence is such a bald-faced liar that he was able to render the normally unflappable Tim Kaine speechless. I was watching at the time and Tim, I got to tell you, I was speechless too.
pin him down, national snooze media! The guy knows nothing and is doing nothing to help schools prepare.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Cheryl Rofer: The bigger the mess left for us to clean up, the more they can blame us for everything next year…
Danielx
@HumboldtBlue:
Can’t be, Cole would have crashed in the first fifteen seconds.
Another Scott
gwangung
@Kay: All these components are part of a system. You can’t demand one thing of a part of a system without getting a reaction out of another part of the system—sometimes a disastrous one.
That’s why there’s a Law of Unintended Consequences.
Conservatives and Republicans think their shit doesn’t think and the Law doesn’t apply to them.
jonas
No, this is seriously parroting a Fox talking point now: “Life is full of risks! Better kids learn this sooner rather than later!”
Mother. Of. God.
jonas
And the rubes that vote for them think *they’re* the ones “draining the swamp.” Lol.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
@Cheryl Rofer: They will blame Dems and government like they always do. Dems will spend 8 years cleaning it up and when they regain power they will do it all over again. Rinse, repeat.
jonas
@Another Scott: The administration’s response to this whole pandemic has always been driven by race, because it’s the only lens they have: it’s a disease that strikes “those people” so, you know, no biggie. As I’ve said over and over, this will only become a major political liability for Republicans when lots — and I mean *lots* of good, white folks start succumbing to it. Until then, the party line will be “well *of course* a bunch of illegals at a meatpacking plant caught it. Have you seen how they live? And what were they doing in this country to begin with?”
Cameron
@Calouste: But Mike Pence just said that Florida’s getting it under control!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Another Scott:
Thats my cousin – doing God’s work.
Jeffro
win, Win, WIN, and WIN. Also moar win.
And then there is the spot-on policy (or lack thereof) analysis
@Another Scott:
So true. This is what the ‘great sorting’ of Americans by psyche gets us: people who believe in science and expertise, and those who consider it all to be a ‘messaging issue’
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Another Scott: Also, its not like ‘their’ kids are in public schools. They can afford to keep them home. They can keep their own families ‘safe’. However, if those other people aren’t out there generating revenue for them, then their income suffers. This is the same logic as the landowners during the potato famine in Ireland. Was it good for their long term interests to have their tenant farmers dying of starvation or fleeing to the US/Australia? No! But they exported their goods instead of feeding their laborers, because they were more worried about the short term financial hit than the long term one.
Mai naem mobile
@khead: Sharpie or whiteout? Maybe even bleach.
Mai naem mobile
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): the employees got evicted from their houses where they were supposed to do the office less thing.
Galahad Threepwood
Like bluehill in an earlier comment, I wonder where the tipping point is. I read that Alexandra Petri piece that was linked above, and Jesus, the comments from Pence and DeVos are bone-chilling. There’s no one at the controls in the middle of the most dangerous pandemic in 100 years, and that should be fucking TERRIFYING to EVERYONE, I don’t care who you are or where you live. And it’s a minimum of 6 months before anything changes, because even if we are able to vote Trump and his band of jackals out of office in November, they’ll still have two more months of fuckery before Biden can take over. It’s insane, and it’s just going to get worse.
Patricia Kayden
Ruckus
@MattF:
shitforbrains® always fails. Because he always does the most stupid, asinine thing possible, because he is a massively ignorant massive asshole. It’s his position in life, it must be, he’s been doing this same routine since he was a child. Which mentally he has never outgrown.
Aleta
Pence Accused of Taking Trump’s Coronavirus Tests for Him
Jinchi
Could we stop slamming parents for wanting their kids to have an education. The overwhelming majority of parents I’ve met in the public schools support their teachers and their schools. They aren’t harping about the “free daycare”. You can’t simply expect a 9 year old to take a year off while the government gets it’s act together. Some of these kids will fall so far behind that the damage will be permanent.
Ruckus
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin):
The gop came up with an idea long ago, which was “Fuck everyone but the rich, white men.” They’ve had success with this idea, because the rich white men pay them peanuts to help make them a hell of a lot richer. It hasn’t worked out so well for everyone else, but then the rich white men didn’t and don’t give a fuck. And the current iteration of this idea hasn’t gone over so well because the support for the idea now comes from the moronic racists that are the by product of the idea’s implementation and their voting for someone even stupider than they are. So we have armed racists with all the self control of a sex maniac in a whorehouse, being led by a guy who doesn’t have the ability to be the janitor at said whorehouse, because he’s too stupid to know which end of a broom to hold and is too full of himself to have room in his tiny brain to learn, which is OK because his brain doesn’t work well enough to, because he’s too busy being a massive racist. So you can see this this is a circle of ignorance and racism, that can not be argued with or cajoled into some semblance of reasonableness because it’s too busy ignoring every clue in the universe of how fucking ignorant it is.
Jinchi
Next you’re going to tell us you didn’t realize AOC was on his Climate Policy task force.
SFAW
@Baud:
Except the Murderer-in-Chief will eventually Sharpie the numbers, and declare that the “original estimate” of anticipated deaths was
102050100 million Americans, so his bold actions saved more than 99 million Americans.The numbers above are bullshit, but I’d bet a case of good beer that he tries to pull his usual rewrite-his-own-history bullshit, and inflates the number he originally said was two million deaths if no one did anything.
Another Scott
ScienceMag:
(Emphasis added.)
Note all the caveats. The US shows little sign of doing what’s necessary to be careful – given the lack of data – via national policy. The increasing community spread in the USA is especially worrying.
Cheers,
Scott.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Look at Trump, when he gets data he doesn’t like and can’t ignore he just screams at his staff until they give him the numbers he wants. Trump’s hardly alone among the elite for this.
Soprano2
I’ve always believed the timing of the reopen protests was no accident. Once the MAGAs figured out the majority of the people who were getting sick and dying were black and brown people in big cities, they started hollering about opening things up. I guess they thought COVID wouldn’t get them. I wonder if they still think that now that FL, TX and AZ are on fire with it. Trump will only start to care about it again if the markets take a nosedive.
Anne Laurie
Oh, I agree with you, and Kay, one thousand percent. But too many Americans (voters), even unfortunately some of those who do have kids in public schools, assume that the ‘real’ purpose of paying taxes to support schools is so that the kids’ parents will be free to support the economy. Learning stuff is just an optional extra, a luxury that happens as a secondary effect to stashing kids out of the workforce for x hours every day. After all, as far as those people remember, they never learned anything useful in school!