In 2008, I wouldn’t have believed that a dozen years later I would have to explain to liberals that George W. Bush’s presidency was a parade of horrors and that he should not be looked upon with any amount of nostalgia.
Throughout the Trump presidency, we have seen numerous examples of establishment Democrats praising George W. Bush or even wishing he were president again.
The latest incident of Bush-related amnesia occurred after he announced the publication of a book containing portraits of new immigrants to this country. Doodles are now part of an effort to erase the failures of an administration whose track record was so horrible that the former president was not even welcome at Mitt Romney’s Republican convention.
The history of his administration is forever tied to its bloodlust for the war in Iraq — a criminal foreign policy failure that killed hundreds of thousands and created destabilization that continues to have ramifications throughout the region for decades to come.
It wasn’t simply Bush’s decision to go to war, but the climate his administration created here at home — where those who questioned this foreign policy blunder were, in today’s parlance, “canceled,” sometimes literally.
Going to war in Iraq was only the beginning. Once the invasion was complete, the occupation of Iraq demonstrated that the Bush administration was as incapable of governing as Donald Trump’s. This mishandling of the war was so bad that, by 2006, even the neocons who backed the war were becoming critical of the administration.
Kenneth Adelman, a member of Bush’s Defense Policy Board who said the invasion would be a “cake walk,” said, “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent.” He continued, “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional.”
This incompetence was further put on display after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA head Michael Brown’s prior experience was that he was an official at the International Arabian Horse Association who happened to be friends with Bush’s 2000 campaign manager Joe Allbaugh.
At the height of his failure, with New Orleans underwater, George W. Bush praised “Brownie” saying he had done “a heck of a job.”
This year, a record spell of wildfires is blanketing much of the state in smoke. Facing a dual threat of reduced air quality coupled with a coronavirus pandemic, Clarence will have to stay indoors around-the-clock.
“We’re in a pandemic and a heat wave, and we don’t have air conditioning,” said Hudson, who’s based in Oakland, where temperatures are usually mild. “We can’t open up the window, we’re trapped, we’re hot and no one can come over to play.”
Californians across the state are now facing a crisis across multiple fronts. As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, lightning strikes and hot weather have fueled dozens of wildfires. Millions face losing power, and thousands have already been evacuated.
The health effects could also be dire, according to medical experts. Some fear that people with chronic respiratory conditions will avoid seeking care if their symptoms worsen because they fear exposure to the coronavirus.
Andrew Kornblatt, who lives in the East Bay, has asthma and is recovering from a surgery. He’s doing his best to avoid refreshing websites with maps showing the spreading fire, but his anxiety is off the charts. “I keep thinking about where we would go if things go south,” he said.
Dr. Sachin Gupta, a pulmonologist based in San Francisco, said he expects that it could be a lot more challenging for Bay Area companies to bring people back into work, particularly those with asthma or other respiratory conditions. “If you think about indoor office spaces, patients with chronic lung conditions were likely already nervous with the pandemic,” he said. “But with the air pollution and struggles to ventilate spaces, would they want to go in now?”
There’s also the concern that the air quality, which ranked the worst in the world in Northern California on Wednesday, could make coronavirus symptoms worse. Research from the spring found that patients in areas with high levels of air pollution were more likely to die from the infection than those in less polluted areas.
California has reported more than 640,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases with more than 11,000 deaths.
“With the wildfires, we’re going to see increases in PM 2.5,” said Dr. Neeta Thakur, a pulmonology and critical physician at UC San Francisco, referring to fine particular matter.
“There’s some studies that have suggested an association between increases in particulate matter and severity of Covid-19 infections,” she said. “Although how those are related is less well understood.”
Conservationists and wildlife experts have expressed grave concern that Australian state governments are continuing to log unburned forests that are home to vulnerable koala populations.
Estimates suggest that at least 5,000 koalas were killed and over 2 million hectares of habitat was destroyed in the state of New South Wales during the 2019/20 bushfires—a devastating blow to a species that is already facing the compounding risks of climate change, urban development and deforestation.
In light of these threats, a recent government inquiry found that the state’s koalas could become extinct by 2050 unless there is urgent government intervention to prevent habitat loss.
Yet despite a number of clear recommendations from that same inquiry—that the NSW government urgently prioritise the protection of koala habitat in urban planning, for example, and that they ban the opening up of old growth forests to logging—the state-owned logging agency Forestry Corporation is continuing to cut down trees in increasingly rare koala habitats.
“It’s a scandal that the government isn’t doing what’s required to prevent the extinction of one of our most iconic species,” James Tremain, from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, told Vice News over the phone. “They’re schizophrenic on the issue. They say they have a koala strategy and an ambition to increase the population of koalas, but they’ve introduced laws that have made it much easier to destroy koala habitat.”
The recent bushfires destroyed millions of hectares of native bushland, but the NSW government has largely maintained the intensity of its logging operations: pledging to maintain wood supply at the same rate as before the disaster. As Tremain explained, that effectively means more intense logging operations across the state as corporations try to yield the same volume of timber from a significantly reduced area of bushland.
Forestry Corporation documents released through parliamentary processes showed that 85 percent of forest previously designated for logging on NSW’s south coast was burned in the bushfires, along with about 44 percent on the north coast. In response, the Forestry Corporation increased its logging intensity to keep up with the demand for timber.
The Nature Conservation Council of NSW previously asked the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to investigate the logging, but was told that operations could not be halted when Forestry Corporation was not in breach of its approvals.
We’re currently getting a vivid, painful reminder of why we need a public sector. The collapse of public services, in particular the provision of public health, has torpedoed the entire economy as a deadly pandemic ravages the country. The end of the road in our current devolution may be the assault on one of our oldest public institutions — the venerable and very popular U.S. Postal Service.
The internet has come to take on much of how we communicate in the 21st Century, but the fact remains that Americans still rely heavily on the delivery of physical correspondence. And it’s not just assistance checks and life-saving medication, all kinds of commerce in private goods is facilitated to a significant extent by the Postal Service’s package delivery. Transport of periodicals, the business of non-profit organizations, and now the very feasibility of our national elections, also all depend on a well-functioning Postal Service.
There has been a cascade of well-founded furor over President Trump’s blatant sabotage of the mail in order to benefit him politically. But focusing only on Trump’s current attacks obscures the bipartisan, neoliberal roots of the current crisis.
Following the U.S. postal strike of 1970, Congress—including Republicans and Democrats — passed the Postal Reorganization Act, which separated the agency from the federal government as an independent, quasi-public corporation. One upside of the change was that postal workers won collective bargaining rights, and the service was largely able to function and escape controversy for decades afterwards. Yet it also ensured that the Postal Service would be run “like a business.”
The 1990s were a period of retrenchment in the public sector. Democratic President Bill Clinton declared, “The era of Big Government is over.” Vice President Al Gore crusaded to “reinvent government.” The administration boasted of its efforts to reduce the number of federal employees, and privatization and shrinking of certain public services became the cause-celebre. The Democratic Leadership Council, also known as ‘New Democrats,’ put much of their faith in markets rather than government.
It could not have been surprising that the neoliberal gunsights later became trained on the U.S. Postal Service. Clinton administration alumna Elaine Kamarck, a leader in Al Gore’s reinventing government project, subsequently called for privatization of the Postal Service.
In 2012, President Barack Obama’s former head of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, also advocated privatization of the Postal Service. Among the Obama administration’s lapses was the failure to appoint its own majority to the Postal Service Board of Governors (BoG). Unfortunately, Obama’s failure to exercise his appointment power was a pattern that affected multiple government institutions. Postal Service employment itself was reduced by almost 20 percent during Obama’s time in office.
The email, sent hours after DeJoy’s public suspension of changes on Tuesday, instructs postal workers not to reconnect any mail sorting machines that have previously been disconnected.
“Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight,” wrote Kevin Couch, a director of maintenance operations. “They are not to reconnect/reinstall machines that have been previously disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager.”
DeJoy announced Tuesday he would pause many of the new policies he put in place, including the removal of high-volume mail sorting machines, after postal workers, the public and some lawmakers, sounded alarms the changes were causing massive delivery delays, potentially putting the November election in peril.
It’s unclear if there’s been additional guidance since Couch sent the email, which appeared to have been sent to managers in the western region.
The USPS has not been attempting to reassemble or replace the mail sorting machines or letter collection recently removed in at least nine states, according to the union officials CNN spoke to in those states.
CNN spoke with union officials across the US on the local, regional and national level, and was only able to identify two facilities – Dallas and Tacoma, Washington – that had attempted to reassemble and reintroduce mail sorting machines back into USPS’s daily operations.
The Postmaster General and USPS have been under intense scrutiny in recent weeks over changes put in motion ahead of the 2020 election. Many Americans have since grown concerned over the USPS’ ability to handle the expected influx of ballots as more voters choose to vote by mail because of the Covid-19 global pandemic.
Dallas facility tried to restore removed mail sorting machines
Yared Wonde, the president of the American Postal Workers Union’s Dallas Area Local, told CNN that management at the Dallas processing and distribution center, which serves nearly all of Dallas, unsuccessfully tried to put back four delivery bar code sorter machines.
DBCS machines make up the bulk of the mail sorting operation across USPS, handling envelopes which includes ballots heading to voters.
The machines, which Wonde says were removed in July, cannot be put back into service because they are missing pieces. Wonde said it was unclear what moved management at the Dallas facility to attempt to reassemble the DBCS machines.
Classroom aides and superintendents were also added to the updated list of critical essential workers that includes doctors, nurses and IT workers, in a memo on Tuesday from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The list was intended to help state, local and tribal officials “protect their workers and communities as they continue to reopen in a phased approach,” said the memo from the department’s cybersecurity and infrastructure agency.
The memo said the move was also needed “to ensure continuity of functions critical to public health and safety, as well as economic and national security.”
The list is advisory and “is not, nor should it be considered, a federal directive or standard,” the memo added.
President Donald Trump has spent the summer pushing hard for schools across the nation to start the academic year with in-person learning, even as cases of the novel coronavirus have surged in some of the country’s most-populous areas, prompting districts to start fall classes online or offer at least some classes virtually.
Educators in Florida and Iowa have filed lawsuits challenging plans to reopen schools in those states, while educators across the country have held protests and threatened to strike if they are forced to go back into classrooms this autumn.
Several schools that began classes in Georgia and Nebraska have had to cancel in-person instruction over the past week due to outbreaks.
As schools reopen in parts of the United States, a study published Thursday found that some children have high levels of virus in their airways during the first three days of infection despite having mild symptoms or none at all — suggesting their role in community spread may be larger than previously believed.
One of the study’s authors, Alessio Fasano, a physician at MassGeneral Hospital for Children, said that because children tend to exhibit few if any symptoms, they were largely ignored in the early part of the outbreak and not tested. But they may have been acting as silent spreaders all along.
“Some people thought that children might be protected,” Fasano said. “This is incorrect. They may be as susceptible as adults — but just not visible.”
The study in the Journal of Pediatrics comes on the heels of two others that offer insights about children and coronavirus transmission. On July 30, researchers reported in JAMA Pediatrics that children younger than 5 with mild or moderate illness have much higher levels of virus in the nose, compared with older children and adults. Shortly before that, investigators in South Korea published a household study that some believed implied older children could spread the virus as readily as adults, while younger children less so. But researchers later clarified that it was unclear whether the transmission came from the older children or from contacts that they shared with other family members.
All three studies were small and contradicted one another in some details, so researchers said they could not draw any definitive conclusions based on any one of them alone. But taken together, they paint a worrisome new picture of children’s role in the pandemic.
The newest study reported that the viral loads of the children were significantly higher than those of severely ill adults in the hospital. However, the children and adults were not in the same stage of illness — the children’s levels were measured on days zero to two of infection, compared to days seven or longer for the adults.
Lael Yonker, the study’s lead author and a pediatric specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said larger side-by-side analysis is needed to compare viral loads over time in adults versus kids.
“But the point is, when you consider the ICU … there are many many precautions in place to protect health care workers from contracting the virus,“ Yonker said. “Kids, mildly symptomatic and early in the infection, are walking around in the community, and we need to minimize the potential of these children to spread virus.”
If you’re confused and overwhelmed by all the political news about the U.S. Postal Service, here’s the key thing to know: At its core, this scandal is not new or innovative. It is the standard government version of the Goodfellas scheme: Deliberately make life impossible for an agency while using it to enrich big campaign donors, “and then finally, when there’s nothing left, when you can’t borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out — you light a match.”
In this case, lighting a match means Trump (with the help of Senate Democrats) putting the postal office under the control of Republican operatives who then eliminated sorting machines, removed mailboxes and restricted postal workers from helping Americans vote absentee. The moves threaten to ignite a fire that could throw the election. Longer term, they could also bolster the argument that the only way to create a more reliable mail system is to hand over the postal service’s core functions to companies led by donors such as FedEx or UPS that funnel big money to Republicans.
This culminating tale of arson is the subject of today’s congressional hearings, but here’s the thing: It didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump’s officials have justified the cutbacks by insinuating that they were merely necessary responses to the long-term financial crisis at the USPS.
“Our financial position is dire, stemming from substantial declines in mail volume, a broken business model and a management strategy that has not adequately addressed these issues,″ said postmaster general Louis DeJoy, a Trump appointee who was a top GOP fundraiser.
The creation of that alleged financial crisis — and whether it is actually even a crisis — is a less-well-publicized but critically important story of malevolence, because it is the foundational justification for everything Trump is now doing.
Over the course of years, the villains in this story manufactured the emergency in four ways: 1) They fabricated the notion that we should look at the post office as a business, but then 2) they subjected the agency to financial standards no other business operates under; 3) they continued blocking the agency from making the kind of investments that corporations and government retirement systems routinely make and 4) they restricted the agency from expanding its revenue-generating operations like postal services in other countries.
Let’s break each of these down.
1: The Post Office As A Business
You’ve heard the assertion a million times: The USPS is supposedly a business, and one that is losing money. But few have bothered to question the absurd premise of it.
Covid-19 tests should be compulsory for all university students and staff to prevent outbreaks on campuses and protect communities, according to an independent group of scientists.
Testing should be carried out either before or as soon as people arrive on campus, with further tests conducted regularly, said the Independent Sage committee.
The recommendation comes in a report published on Friday that advises universities to provide online learning as the default rather than in-person teaching, noting the latter carried “the most risk of transmission” of coronavirus.
The scientists also advised that freshers’ week events, which usually revolve around parties and drinking, should be held online. Socialising should be restricted to students’ residential bubbles, they added.
Where in-person teaching is necessary, students and staff should wear face coverings and practise physical distancing in classrooms, the expert group advised. It said students should be asked to sign a social behaviour agreement, with breaches possibly leading to disciplinary action.
The recommendation ahead of universities returning in the autumn comes as Manchester, which has the fourth-largest student population in the UK, remains in local lockdown owing to a recent significant rise in the number of Covid-19 cases, and fears that Birmingham, which has the eighth largest, could soon have one imposed.
Stephen Reicher, a behavioural science expert on the Independent Sage committee, said in a city such as London the proportion of students in the population did not pose a significant risk to local infection rates, but that this was not the case in smaller university towns.
“Somewhere like St Andrews, where there are as many students as local people, the last thing we want to happen is a spike in infections,” added Reicher, a professor of social psychology at St Andrews.
The report also recommended that universities should provide accommodation where students can safely quarantine, and have food and online lessons provided. It said halls of residence were likely to be a main source of transmission of Covid-19 and recommended temperature checks on entering buildings.
Prof Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, welcomed the report but cautioned against banning social activities.
Sridhar, a member of the Scottish government’s coronavirus advisory group, said: “I don’t think you can ban things without the risk of driving them underground. You have to be realistic that the 20-29 years age group is least likely to abide by pandemic restrictions. The approach should be more about harm reduction, such as holding social events outdoors under tents.”
