Former treasury secretary to George W Bush dies. Paul O’Neill, a former Treasury secretary who broke with George W. Bush over tax policy and then produced a book critical of the administration, died Saturday. He was 84.
Amy Klobuchar on US response: ‘There was never a national strategy’. The former presidential candidate and sitting Minnesota senator, whose husband caught coronavirus, accused the Trump administration of losing time by not having a national strategy to combat the coronavirus.
Fact check: ‘More guns sold than any time in history’
Trump said that Democrats in Virginia were talking about “taking your guns away” at the same time that there were “more guns sold that I think at any time in history”.
Trump is correct that background checks for gun sales and other transactions reached historic highs in early March, in the early weeks of the pandemic, although that’s only according to FBI data going back to 1998.
A New York Times analysis of federal data, which tries to separate out background checks for gun sales alone from checks conducted for other reasons, like issuing permits to carry a concealed weapon, estimated that there were slightly fewer guns sold in March 2020 than in January 2013, as President Obama vowed to pass new gun control measures after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December.
There’s more on the claim that Virginia Democrats want to take guns away” in a previous post. You can read more about the record-breaking gun background check numbers here:
Asked about his tweets encouraging protests against shutdown measures imposed by Democratic governors, Trump said some states were being “unreasonable”.
“They’re using this – they’re trying to take your guns away in Virginia. And if people in Virginia aren’t careful, that’s what’s going to happen,” Trump claimed.
“They want to violate your Second Amendment.”
The facts: After years of resistance to gun control by Republican lawmakers, Virginia citizens elected a Democratic-controlled state government in November. Virginia’s Democrats moved swiftly to pass sweeping new gun control laws, including a requirement to conduct background checks before all gun sales, a one-gun-a-month purchase limit, and the creation of an extreme risk protection order, which creates a way to petition a court to temporarily remove a person’s guns if they are at imminent risk of hurting themselves or someone else.
The gun control measures Democrats have passed in Virginia have already been passed in many other states across the country, and have not been found to violate the Second Amendment. By global standards, the restrictions are quite modest. Some, like the creation of extreme risk protection orders, have even found bipartisan support in the past, including from Trump himself. But Democrats’ push for gun control provoked huge grassroots protests by gun rights activists in Virginia, culminating in a demonstration that brought an estimated 22,000 people, many of them armed, to Virginia’s capital in January. Trump cheered on the protesters at the time.
The protests were fueled in part by a very real, new push for gun control in a state that had previously been seen as a gun rights haven. But they were also fueled by lies, conspiracies and misinformation.
Virginia’s Democrats quickly backed away from their most controversial policy proposal, a draft of an assault weapon ban that was originally written to include a ban on the possession of military-style weapons. But gun rights activists, who saw the draft legislation as proof that Virginia Democrats were interested in literally going door-to-door to confiscate Virginians’ AR-15 rifles, were not persuaded by the reversal, and have continued to raise fears about gun confiscation.
The fight over gun control in Virginia predates the coronavirus pandemic, and was well on its way immediately after Democrats won the election in November.
The president just said: “What we’ve done for Aids in Africa is unbelievable. We’ve spent $6bn a year. That’s been going on for a long time. Nobody knows that. You’ve never heard that. I’ve never heard that.”
We must say here that a lot of people know that. Probably the most relevant thing there is Trump saying that he has never heard that.
The spending quote for Africa is part of the annual $6.8bn in US funds for global HIV and Aids relief. What Donald Trump failed to say is that while he is keen to spend more on beating HIV and Aids in the US, he has proposed cuts in US funding funding for Aids programs in Africa.
Here are extracts from this report in the Washington Blade from February, 2020:
With a declared goal of beating HIV/AIDS in the United States by 2030, President Trump this week in his $4.8 trillion budget request for fiscal year 2021 proposed major increases in HIV/AIDS funds, but global programs and social services used by low-income people with the disease face steep cuts....
But despite $716 million proposed to beat HIV in a PrEP-centric “Ending the HIV Epidemic” initiative, the budget seeks to cut Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS, or HOPWA, by $80 million, halve funding for PEPFAR and reduce the U.S. commitment to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculous & Malaria....
For the Bush-era President’s Emergency Plan AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which provides HIV treatment drugs to developing countries, primarily in Africa, Trump seeks $3.2 billion, which is $1.17 billion less than the money Congress appropriated for fiscal year 2020 funding levels. The proposed reduction is even steeper than the cut proposed by Trump in the previous budget request by $200 million.
For the Global Fund, Trump proposed to contribute $1 for every $3 donated to the partnership, which is a reduction from an earlier U.S. commitment to donate $1 for every $2.
Trump has abruptly ended the news conference after just over an hour, taking fewer questions than he normally does. With so much time devoted toward gun control in Virginia and his views on the press and projecting his vision of the country if Joe Biden wins November’s election – and so little on the coronavirus pandemic – today’s briefing, which you can watch here in full, very quickly took on the feel of a campaign rally.
Trump is asked about a tweet he shared that questioned “whether authorities will “enforce the social distancing orders for mosques during Ramadan (April 23-May23) like they did churches during Easter”.
Trump said that he just had a call with imams, ministers, and rabbis, and that “I am somebody who believes in faith and it matters not what your faith is.” But other people were biased, he said, and, in particular, biased against Christians.
“Our politicians try to treat different faiths very differently. The Christian faith is treated much differently than it was and I think it’s treated very unfairly.”
About 70% of Americans describe themselves as Christian, according to a Pew survey of America’s religious landscape, and 25% as Evangelical Christian. Only 0.9% describe themselves as Muslim.
“We’re spending mostly in Africa, six billion dollars a year,” Trump says. “That’s on Aids. What we’ve done for Aids in Africa is unbelievable. We’ve spent $6bn a year. That’s been going on for a long time. Nobody knows that. You’ve never heard that. I’ve never heard that. Millions of people are living right now and living very comfortably because of the fact that we have found the answer to that horrible, horrible plague. That was a plague. But we spend $6bn a year and from what I hear it’s very well spent, done by professionals including this great professional (Dr Birx).”
He continues: “The World Health Organization, we’re just finding more and more problems. We spend this money really well. There are other ways we can spend the $500m. We can find other ways to spend it where people are going to be helped in a much greater way.”
Trump continues his broadside against the media, taking dead aim at New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman for a recent story which included a report that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has cried during meetings with administration staff on at least two occasions.
“I even read a story where Mark Meadows, who’s a tough guy, he was crying. This is Maggie Haberman. You know, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Russia but she was wrong on Russia. So was everyone else. They should all give back their Pulitzer Prizes. In fact it turned out that the crime was committed by the other side. The crime was not committed by this side, it was committed by the other side. A bunch of bad people.”
He continued: “So Maggie Haberman gets a Pulitzer Prize. She’s a third-rate reporter. New York Times. And we put her name up here last week. People thought it was a commercial, it wasn’t a commercial. It was like a commerical but it wasn’t a commercial. It was just clips. And because we exposed her as being a bad reporter, what happened is she came out and said Mark Meadows was crying. It’s OK if he did ... but he’s not a cryer. It was a nasty story in so many ways. It was fake news. And she only did it because we exposed her for being a terrible, dishonest reporter. I haven’t spoken with her for a long time.”
Donald Trump is complaining about mainstream media outlets using anonymous sources.
Fact check: Top level publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, etc, use on the record sources wherever possible in their reporting.
But occasionally, the only way a story can be fully reported is to use sources who, the journalists agree, cannot be named because they were not authorized to talk, are afraid of retribution or being in danger, or or some other carefully considered reasons.
Normally, the reporter will have verifiable information about the source and what they are telling the outlet, and the use of an unnamed source, and the reason they are remaining anonymous, will have to be authorized by senior editor(s).
At a Saturday briefing, Trump once again said the US has the greatest economy in the world.
It is true that the US is the richest country in the world and that – before the pandemic - Trump had presided over a record breaking 113 straight months of job growth and all time highs on the stock markets.
But there were big problems with the US economy before Covid-19 hit. Stock market gains benefit mainly the wealthy. The richest 1% of Americans own more than half the value of equities owned by US households, according to Goldman Sachs.
And too many of the new jobs created under Trump were low wage. Even billionaires were worrying about growing income inequality. Minorities, who earn less on average, failed to make much ground in the boom years and are now the first, and the hardest hit, in the downturn.
“It could have been stopped in China before it started and the whole world is suffering because of it,” Trump says. “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. Better than China, better than any country in the world, better than any country has ever had. We had the highest stock market in history by far – and I’m honored by the fact has started to up very substantially. That’s because the market is smart.”
“The hardest thing of all by far, by a factor of 20, is the ventilators,” Trump says. “Now we’re the king of ventilators. We have ventilators and we’re going to be helping other countries very soon.”
He continues: “Unfortunately some partisan voices are attempting to politicize the issue of testing – because I inherited broken junk. Just as they did with ventilators where we had virtually none and the hospitals were empty. For the most part the hospitals didn’t have ventilators. We had take care of the whole country ... and now the rest of the world is coming to us asking if we can help with ventilators because they’re very complicated, very expensive. They’re very hard to build. And we have them coming in by the thousand.”
While the coronavirus death rates in the US, both in comparison to the number of confirmed cases and in comparison to the population, are relatively good they are not the best in the world. Research by the US’s Johns Hopkins University showed that as of April 13, the death rate in the US was 4% of cases and 6.73 deaths per 100,000 population.
That is significantly better than rates in hard hit countries such as Italy, Spain, the UK and France, and similar overall to Iran, which was also an early hotspot.
But death rates are higher in the US than Germany, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and many other countries. The death rate in China has been recorded as 4% of cases and 0.2 deaths per 100,000 population, but there are ongoing questions about China’s reported death toll.
Trump opens his daily coronavirus briefing on an offensive tack, accusing the media of failing to tout statistics that prove the US is winning the battle against the coronavirus better than any other nation.
“The United States has produced dramatically better health outcomes than any other country with the possible exception of Germany,” Trump says. “On a per-capita basis, our mortality rate is far lower than other nations of western Europe with the lone exception of possibly Germany. This includes the UK, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, France. Spain, for example, has a mortality rate that is nearly four times that of the United States. But you don’t hear that. You hear we have more death, but we’re a much bigger country than any of those countries by far.
“So when the fake news gets out there, they start talking about the United States has No 1. But we’re not No 1, China is No 1. Just so you understand. China is No 1 by a lot. It’s not even close. They’re way ahead of us in terms of death. It’s not even close. You know it. I know it. They know it. But you don’t want to report it. Why? You’ll have to explain that. Someday I’ll explain it.”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has announced that all K-12 schools in Florida will continue with distance learning for the rest of the school year at a news conference on Saturday in Tallahassee.
Students across the state have been learning from home for more than month with the original order for online classes set to end on 15 April before it was extended to 1 May.
Then in a big reversal, DeSantis said he will release the names the nursing homes and assisted living facilities where residents and staff have tested positive for Covid-19 in the interest of public health.
The decision comes at a time when multiple media organizations have criticized DeSantis’s administration for its lack of transparency, even threatening to sue for the information. As the Miami Herald wrote this week:
In recent weeks, Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration has refused to name the nursing homes experiencing coronavirus outbreaks, even as the number of cases in long-term care facilities has passed 1,300. The Department of Corrections had until Wednesday declined to acknowledge two inmate COVID-19 deaths at a privately run prison. And the Department of Health has been unwilling to disclose the extent of an undefined backlog of unresolved coronavirus tests at private labs.
In some cases, the lack of detail has appeared unintentional: DeSantis said Wednesday that he, himself, had been unable to get information about how many people have received unemployment checks from the Department of Economic Opportunity. By Thursday, DeSantis put the number of claims paid at around 33,000, with the state reporting a backlog of more than 800,000.
But the state’s secrecy has led to increasing criticism from Democrats and transparency advocates, who say DeSantis is keeping critical information under wraps at a time when people need to know more about what’s happening in order to make informed decisions about their lives and livelihoods.
“Openness, helpfulness, honesty: that’s what we want from our government in a crisis,” Marsh said Thursday in an interview.
The Florida governor also said his task force charged with working on a plan to re-open the economy amid the pandemic will start meeting “telephonically” on Monday and will issue short-term recommendations to him before the end of the week.
“They’re meeting every day this coming week and I was some recommendations by the end of the week,” DeSantis said. “So, hey, if they solve the world in three days, then they don’t have to meet [the rest of the week].”
Florida governor Ron DeSantis is set to make a “major announcement” regarding Covid-19 at a news conference at 4:30pm, according to a release from his office.
The announcement will come as the governor has made the push for the re-opening of beaches along the state’s 1,350 miles of shoreline if it can be done safely, a decision that has been in the hands of local governments.
DeSantis, whose victory in a hard-fought 2018 election that drew national attention was tipped largely by Trump’s endorsement and cash from the president’s allies, issued a “safer at home” order on 1 April, but he was explicit in classifying walking, running and swimming as essential activities.
A Michigan prisoner who declined to be paroled in May after decades behind bars has died from Covid-19 complications, the Detroit Free Press reports.
William Garrison was due to come home from prison in early May. After nearly 44 years incarcerated, he would be free from a life sentence handed to him as a juvenile.
His sister Yolanda Peterson had prepared a room for him to stay in her Harper Woods home and planned for his parole agent to come see the place. She was brainstorming how, given the coronavirus pandemic, she might help her brother celebrate his 61st birthday at the end of May.
Plans for the future fell apart Monday, when Peterson got word that her brother had died unexpectedly in prison.
Garrison’s bunkmate found him gasping for air that evening in their two-man cell at Macomb Correctional Facility, according to Michigan Department of Corrections spokesman Chris Gautz. Staff performed CPR. Garrison was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Gautz said.
A postmortem test confirmed that he was positive for Covid-19. He hadn’t complained to his family or prison staff of coronavirus symptoms.
Peterson said it hurts for her brother to die now after “surviving 44 years in prison,” when his freedom was weeks away. “My brother shouldn’t have died in there like that,” she said Friday evening.
Peterson believes that prison staff should have done more to prevent her brother from contracting the virus. She said men in prison have told her that her brother’s cellmate was ill several days before Garrison died.
The Department of Corrections disputed that account. Gautz said health care staff went cell-to-cell to assess prisoners in the days before Garrison died, and Garrison’s bunkmate denied having symptoms of Covid-19, aside from a cough. The man later tested negative for the coronavirus when assessed again after Garrison’s death, Gautz said.
Garrison is one of 17 state prisoners who’ve died of Covid-19 as of Friday.
Then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, left, is joined by then Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and then New York City Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen, right, on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor when trading resumed for the first time since the previous week’s terrorist attack. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP
Paul O’Neill, a former Treasury secretary who broke with George W. Bush over tax policy and then produced a book critical of the administration, died Saturday. He was 84. O’Neill’s son, Paul O’Neill Jr. confirmed that his father died at his home in Pittsburgh after battling lung cancer for the last couple of years, The Associated Press writes.
A former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, O’Neill served as treasury secretary from 2001 to late 2002. He was forced to resign after he objected to a second round of tax cuts because of their impact on deficits.
O’Neill’s blunt speaking style more than once got him in trouble as Treasury secretary.
He sent the dollar into a tailspin briefly in his early days at Treasury when his comments about foreign exchange rates surprised markets.
In the spring of 2001, O’Neill jolted markets again when during Wall Street’s worst week in 11 years, he blandly declared “markets go up and markets go down.”
Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said Saturday on Twitter: “Saddened to hear of the passing of the former 72nd Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill. He served (at)USTreasury and America with distinction during challenging times. My condolences to his family.”
After leaving the administration, O’Neill worked with author Ron Suskind on an explosive book covering his two years in the administration. O’Neill contended that the administration began planning the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein right after Bush took office, eight months before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. O’Neill depicted Bush as a disengaged president who didn’t encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one discussions with Cabinet members. He said the lack of discussion in Cabinet meetings gave him the feeling that Bush “was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people.” He said major decisions were often made by Bush’s political team and Vice President Dick Cheney.
