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• Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden called for the next pandemic stimulus bill to be much bigger, and much greener. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting that there will be another round of stimulus, and is being pressed to focus that next bill more directly on where it is most needed.
• A second tranche of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, administered by the Small Business Administration in a congressionally funded attempt to encourage small businesses to continue paying employees during pandemic shutdowns, was halted within four minutes of relaunch after the system was overwhelmed with new submissions.
• Fewer than one-third of the 24 million Americans filing unemployment insurance claims since pandemic closures began have so far received benefits.
• In their first act since Trump fired the person tasked by Congress to oversee the effort, the Council of the Inspectors General has begun to set up the planned oversight apparatus. Its actual oversight abilities remain in doubt.
• After delaying mailed pandemic relief checks so that Trump’s signature could be placed on them, Trump will now also be sending letters to taxpayers who received their CARES Act payments via direct deposit—also signed by Trump. The move is seen as yet another politically motivated attempt to take credit for the payments, despite Congress doing the actual “paying” part.
• Somewhat at odds with those claims of generosity-by-proxy, Trump is also attaching himself to new Republican arguments that “Democrat-run” states facing pandemic troubles should not be given “bailout help” by the federal government. Those Republican claims have met fierce challenges from blue-state officials and others, who have been quick to note that large Democratic-led states generally dump far more money into federal coffers than they take, while red-leaning states like Kentucky remain ever-reliant on federal “bailouts.”
• A new 57-page National Republican Senatorial Committee-distributed memo advises Republican senators running for reelection to “attack China” rather than defending Trump’s performance, and provides talking points for Republicans to use in attempting to shift blame for the U.S. pandemic to China rather than Trump’s refusal to take action in the early days of the pandemic’s spread.
• Recent claims by a pair of California doctors purporting to show vastly higher public infection rates than reported, and therefore vastly lower overall fatality rates, are being pilloried for egregious statistical and methodological errors.
• Ever-anonymous administration officials continue to ever-anonymously express their irritation with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s incoherent management of White House pandemic measures, with one official grousing that Kushner “is solving the coronavirus like he’s bringing peace to the Middle East.”
• Black and brown business owners in America continue to have “little to no chance of getting even a fraction” of passed coronavirus relief funding, even as millions are handed out to well-connected companies in far less dire financial condition.
• Republican voters and strategists both are increasingly worried that mass deaths might turn out, practically and politically, to be a bad thing.
• One of the few things that could turn the hoped-for discovery of a COVID-19 vaccine sour: concerns that the Trump White House would preferentially distribute the vaccine to Republican-led states or corporate allies, as has been the case when distributing other pandemic supplies and equipment.
• Despite running ships under foreign flags to avoid U.S. taxes, safety rules, and environmental regulations, pandemic-hit Carnival Cruise Line has received a multibillion-dollar bailout from the Federal Reserve.
• The immigrant detention center with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the country turned down a delivery of roughly 1,000 donated masks for detainees, insisting “all detainees” now have “appropriate personal protective equipment.”
• An organizer for an anti-lockdown “Reopen NC” event in North Carolina revealed she had tested positive for the virus 14 days ago, but would not answer questions as to whether she had attended anti-lockdown protests during the period she was infected.
• New Washington Post and New York Times analyses determines Trump’s marathon daily briefings lean heavily on lying and self-congratulation, if anyone was still wondering about that.
• Bestselling author Kelly Yang videotaped the last moments of a racist attack by a screaming couple calling her an “oriental” and telling her to “go back where you came from,” the latest in a surge of racist attacks on Asian Americans as Trump and other Republicans ramp up invective against what they have attempted to relabel the “China virus.”
