Day: April 7, 2020

On February 23, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro addressed a memo to President Donald Trump warning that as many as 2 million Americans could die from the coronavirus. Trump wants you to believe it was never brought to his attention.

That memo and another similarly dire memo Navarro authored in January were published on Monday by Axios. Asked about them during the latest White House coronavirus task force briefing, Trump played dumb.

“I didn’t see ’em, but I heard some memos talking about pandemic [sic],” Trump said on Tuesday. “I didn’t see ’em, I didn’t look for …

Despite Wisconsin being under a shelter-in-place order since March 25 due to the coronavirus pandemic, polls still opened in the state’s primary election on Tuesday, April 7.

Wisconsin, which has more than 2,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of April 5, is the only state out of 11 originally scheduled to hold Democratic presidential primaries in April that has not postponed or substantially changed the way people can vote in this spring’s primaries.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers repeatedly attempted to delay the state’s elections, citing fears that in-person voting could bolster the spread of the coronavirus. But Wisconsin Republicans …

Wisconsin held the first in-person election on Tuesday in the middle of the US coronavirus outbreak. In some precincts, it was an event plagued by hours-long waits and a tremendous shortage of both polling workers and stations, prompting civil- and voting-rights activists to call the legitimacy of the election into question before polls even closed.

State Republicans on Monday won a recent and bitter back-and-forth with Wisconsin’s Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on whether to postpone the election and further expand absentee ballot access. The Republican-majority state Supreme Court ruled the election would go ahead on April 7 as planned, and …

There is something deeply frightening about relying on billionaires to save us in this crisis. But what if we have no better choice?

The US government has repeatedly proven to be sluggish at best and impotent at worst at controlling the carnage of the coronavirus crisis. American deaths are now over 10,000, officials are comparing this week to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, and at times it can feel like there are no leaders who can help.

But saviors, of a sort, loom: billionaires — and tech billionaires in particular.

Tech billionaires dominate the list of the world’s wealthiest people. And …

It was the White House coronavirus clash of the heavyweights: Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the most respected public health official currently working in the US government, against Peter Navarro, an eccentric Trump economic adviser who shares the president’s anti-China obsession (and once quoted a fake version of himself named Ron Vara — an anagram for Navarro — in a book he wrote).

Per Axios, Navarro got into it during a coronavirus task force meeting on Saturday. Navarro claimed that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that Trump had been touting as a potential counter-coronavirus drug, had been shown to have …

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, in a case that is literally titled Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, handed down a decision that will effectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters. It did so at the urging of the GOP.

The case arises out of Wisconsin’s decision to hold its spring election during the coronavirus pandemic, even as nearly a dozen other states have chosen to postpone similar elections in order to protect the safety of voters. Democrats hoped to defend a lower court order that allowed absentee ballots to be counted so long as they arrived …

President Donald Trump was asked repeatedly during Monday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing about a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general report detailing the federal government’s failure to provide hospitals with the testing and equipment resources they need. His contemptuous responses spoke volumes about his disdain for oversight, as well as for any reporter who has the gall to ask him questions he doesn’t like.

The HHS IG report was released on Monday, two days after Trump fired intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson for not doing his political bidding with a whistleblower’s complaint about …