Yesterday, Joe Biden had his hour-long town hall on CNN about the coronavirus, hosted by Anderson Cooper, which pre-taped questions from viewers.  It was good, not brilliant, but there's a limit to what he can say for an hour when he's not the president.  But he was compassionate, personal and heartfelt, while addressing what's been missed by the administrations, what's needed, and that he wrote an op-ed about this back in January, despite Trump saying "No one knew."

Here’s the last two minutes.  It’s not brilliant, but warm and touching.  Also telling about Biden is of notice the moment near the end when he starts to say something, and then catches himself and explains why he stopped, but goes on in a sort of tangential way to say the same thing but less directly.  I don’t want to give it away, but it’s pure Biden.

But mainly, the reason I'm posting this is because I watched this and thought -- Imagine the debate between Biden and Trump, and a question is asked about the human cost of the pandemic.  Biden gives an answer along these lines, and then it's Trump's turn.

Last week, rather than embedded one of his podcasts, I posted a link to a scathing article, titled "The Last Straw"  that Al Franken wrote on his website.  Today we're making it two in a row, because his article this week makes the previous one look almost tame.  It's called, "The President is Crazy."

Throughout the blunt article about Trump's continuing, dangerous failures, Franken makes a number of pointed statements about Trump's mental health, each with an asterisk.  When you jump down to the end to find out what all these observations of Trump's psychological state refer to, it's Franken's acknowledgement of fairness and transparency, noting -- "*I am not a psychiatrist. Nor have I personally examined the President."

Still, he remains pointed in his comments.  For instance, Franken writes --

"The president’s mental illness* allows him to be both intellectual sloth and supremely confident jerk, ever convinced that he (and he alone) can do everyone else’s job better than they. Generals, climate scientists, public health experts. And he’s always right. Because he’s a psychopath*.  And this Donald Trump brand of psychopath* is never wrong. Even when being wrong will cause the additional deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans."

But as subjective as the article is, the article may be at its harshest when Franklen lists a lengthy timeline of how Trump's coronavirus inaction has played out -- in Trump's own words.  As I noted yesterday when posting the two video ads against Trump, it is this -- Trump's own words -- that I'm sure are going to be at the forefront of Democrats' criticism of him in the coming campaign.  And so, this is just one more.

You can read the full article here.

A "virtual" meeting of G7 foreign ministers split yesterday.  And the reason was that for the joint statement intended to be released, the United States wanted the coronavirus to be identified as the "Wuhan virus."  The other nations wouldn't agree to that and rejected that, releasing separate statements.

Since the United States holds the presidency for the G7, it was responsible for writing the initial draft.  The proposed ​by the United States also blamed China for the pandemic's spread..   However, one of the European diplomats said, "What the State Department has suggested is a red line. You cannot agree with this branding of this virus and trying to communicate this."

Oddly, since two statements were released, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin ended up signing a G7 finance ministers' statement that they were extending their nations' coordination "to respond to the global health, economic, and financial impacts associated with the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)."

But, I mean, seriously, folks?  This is what Trump was willing to split a coalition statement during a worldwide pandemic over???

One of the most iconic record album covers has brought about a couple of interesting photos that I thought wer worth passing along.  This first comes in a tweet from a British TV writer --

​And then, with thanks to Eric Boardman for the head's up, there's this social distancing fix --
​

While this doesn't fall under the heading of Good News, it is positive -- and these days that's a leap in the right direction.

When a coronavirus vaccine is available -- in months, or a year, or two years -- the Washington Post reports that scientists studying its genetic code believe the vaccine will be a long-lasting one, and not something needed to be developed for each new strain.  For instance, the SARS epidemic a few years back was also a coronavirus.  (The coronavirus is the generic name for this virus.  The name of this specific, new strain is COVID-19.)

The vaccine would most likely be more along the lines of the measles or chickenpox vaccines, something that would provide immunity for many years.

“That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” said Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “At this point, the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year like the flu vaccine.”

You can read the full article here.

Bandy Lee is a psychiatrist at Yale University and a violence expert.  In her brief Twitter-bio, she describes herself as "Violence expert and forensic psychiatrist of 20 years, uninvolved in politics until politics invaded her area of expertise."

Six years go, two years before there was a thought of Trump in the White House, she had done a research study of violence. She decided to bring it to more public attention on Sunday because she saw a comment from one of her social media followers about how a Democratic president would have responded to the coronavirus crisis differently than the Republican in office.  Unlike other people who may have had the same random thought, Dr. Lee had had the expertise to check it out.

In her response yesterday, she gave a cursory overview of the results in a series of tweets.  I selected a few, and will let her speak for herself, since she does it so much better.  And to repeat, this was not done as a way to condemn Trump, since it was completed two years before he took office.  What it does, though, is confirm the legendary adage by historian George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 

​You can find the full study here.

For those here who don't want to read the full research study -- which I'm going to guess is pretty much everyone -- this is the opening Abstract introduction to the paper, with its summary of Objectives, Methods, Results and Conclusion.  I don't expect many (as in perhaps any) to read through all of even the Abstract, but I include it here so that you can at least see the foundation of what Dr. Lee was seriously dealing with.

As has been widely reported, the Trump administration shut down the Pandemic Response unit in 2018.  And not longer after, they didn't renew the cuts of $8.5 billion to the CDC's budget for infectious diseases.  You may have thought that that was about as bad as it could get and couldn't get any worse.  Though, in fairness, at this point with the Trump administration, you probably are well-past that kind of limited thinking.

Yes, it can get worse.  And did.  Of course.  This is TrumpLand.

It turns out that the CDC had an epidemiologist on the job in Beijing, Dr. Linda Quick, who work it was, specifically, to detect disease outbreaks in Asia.

The Trump administration fired her in July, 2019, just months before the coronavirus broke out.

You can read the full story here from Reuters.

This is not a picture of my mother.  It comes pretty darn close.  She was 89 when she passed away.  She was small, about 5'3" and 95 pounds, somewhat short-cut gray hair.  She also had polio, and then late in her life developed something that's called post-polio -- it weakens the neck muscles, and so her head drooped.  (When she sat down, though, her head would fall back into its normal position, and sometimes she wore a neck brace.)

When I saw this picture below, I almost burst into tears.  I don't mean that in a metaphoric, social media kind of  way, where so many people "literally started crying" when they post a photo of a heart-breakingly cute puppy.  I mean I almost burst into tears.  And when I'd look at the picture again, several times, the same wave of emotion returned, each time

The one thing I know about my mother, though, was that as frail as she was, she was one of the strongest people I've ever known.  Again, I mean that quite literally.  I won't go through the litany of physical things she dealt with her whole life, but will just say that when that's your life, she just accepted it and plowed on and never complained.  As in, never.

(Okay, once. When she was 85 and had a stroke, that happily she recovered from, followed by macular degeneration, I was talking with her on the phone and ran through the litany of issues she'd dealt with her whole life, and then asked something I never had before, "So, mom, do you ever look up to the sky and say, 'Okay, God, I get it.  You can move on to someone else now."?  There was a brief pause, and then she said as simply as possible, "Yes."  That was the closest I ever came to hearing her complain.  And that was only because I asked.

I can't say that that's the same for this lady in the photo.  I hope it is.  But even when you plow on and don't ever complain, life is still there, sometimes pounding you.  

And so I look at this photo with great difficulty.  And anger at the hoarding.  And at the figure in charge who called it all a "hoax.