Does this look like leadership to you?

This ad, created by Republicans, will air on Fox News tomorrow morning.

The British government has published a Bill to establish “new emergency powers”. Goodness knows what horrors of state-expansion it contains. I hope they haven’t taken inspiration from France, where everyone needs to fill out a form before they can leave the house.

You want to stretch your legs, just go for a walk? You need the form. Even just to take the dog out, you have to fill in the form or be fined €135. And you need a new form every time you leave the house.

@Tom_Winter

NEW: New York City now has 3,615 positive cases of COVID-19 and 22 deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio announces.

Big numbers from New York, which are increasing rapidly. I think it’s, in part, due to a ramping up of testing. We know that all the bad stuff is the president’s fault. He didn’t test anyone, he closed the borders, he didn’t close the borders and so on. But who is in charge of what, health care wise?

Cities have mayors, legislatures, powers and budgets. States have governors, legislatures, powers and budgets. The United States is a federal republic. The president cannot do everything, nor does the president have have the power to do or order everything. So while I’m not overly impressed with the president’s conduct of what he is responsible for in this epidemic, I suspect that plenty of people with the power to take action and take responsibility on their own patch have been hiding behind his skirts.

Tomorrow the schools close. Assuming they re-open as normal in September, that’s six months that teachers will be in their pyjamas. They’ll still moan about how hard pressed they are.

So I propose that their pay be slashed. We can say by a half. They need to show solidarity with everyone in the productive economy. It is not acceptable for them, and hundreds of thousands of government bureaucrats, to sit at home while the rest of us keep it going, and doing so while many of us are losing jobs. In fact we might all have to earn less –

@ReutersBiz

Deutsche Bank slashed its forecast for Germany’s economy on the coronavirus fallout, saying it now expected the euro zone’s largest economy to contract between 4-5% in 2020 while industrial production could shrink by 10%

If a tree falls in the forest & no one hears it….does it still make a noise? https://t.co/9186kxrkNr

— DogWhisperer (@cannotrunfast) March 19, 2020

The Inevitable Shoe Drops: DOJ Dismisses Mueller’s Charges against Russian Businesses https://t.co/6iMKrdBwiX

— The Troll (@TheCityTroll) March 19, 2020

More than an investigation, the Mueller probe was the wellspring of a political narrative. That becomes clearer as time goes by and more information ekes out . . . such as new confirmation that, months before Mueller was appointed in May 2017, it was already well understood in Justice Department circles that there was no case of criminal “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Never was that made more obvious than by the Justice Department’s quiet announcement late Monday, under the five-alarm noise of the coronavirus scare, that it has dropped the special counsel’s indictment of Russian companies — an outcome I predicted here at National Review nearly two years ago. 

Let me repeat something else I said several times: This is not to say that Russia is innocent. Again, I accept the intelligence agencies’ conclusion on this point (though a number of others, including some former U.S. intelligence officials, do not). But the point is that Mueller could never have proved it beyond a reasonable doubt under courtroom due-process standards. Any competent defense lawyer would have had a field day with the Obama Justice Department’s failure to have the FBI take possession and conduct its own forensic examination of the servers that were hacked. And what fun defense counsel would have had with DOJ’s delegation of that rudimentary investigative task to a DNC contractor with close ties to the Clinton campaign. (Yes, the forensic conclusions blaming Russia were paid for by the same folks who brought you the famously dodgy Steele dossier.)

Everyone is home in my house. The interplay between normal and abnormal is part of the crazy world we now live in. I’m reading news that the actor Tom Hanks has the virus. I’m reading news the football player Tom Brady is going to a new team. I’m walking the dog. I haven’t been to the office since last Friday.
Ive watched some decent films, 1917 was visually great, good acting, but oddly not moving. I watched The Sting again, a well deserved Oscar. Shaw was great in it. I may binge his films (Jaws, A Man For All Seasons, Taking of Pelham 123).
The closed and closing businesses are scary. No school for the kids -for the month? For the year? Working from home sucks, though i dont miss taking the train and the subway.
The government may be sending us all a thousand dollars. That worries me nearly as much as them not sending it.
My mom’s 85, one town away. How long can i keep making my daily runs to see her from six feet away? Is this going to escalate to stay in place marshall law?
Some things seem positive. China’s numbers of infected are declining. But are their numbers real? What if there is a second wave? Where will we be a year from now? It is four in the morning as I am typing this. I suspect I’m not the only person losing sleep. The kids are sleeping fine, thankfully. For now. What is their world going to look like ten years from now?

Whatever the Chinese Disease does, it won’t do as much damage in the long run as the horrific outbreak of socialism the British government has inflicted on us. “War is the health of the state”, wrote Randolph Bourne. The coronavirus is proving to be a very effective substitute for war.

All schools across the UK will be closed from Friday. The kiddies can’t believe their luck. The shelves are still empty. No-one is going to pubs and restaurants. The Telegraph and the Financial Times report that London is about to be locked down innit. They’ve even rolled out Dame Vera Lynn to invoke the Blitz spirit.

I  don’t want these sniffles either, so I’m being cautious. But we do know that most people who get this thing will just have a rough few days, don’t we? Some won’t even know that they had it. Some will have it rougher and a few won’t make it. So it’s like the flu then, except that the flu will kill more people everywhere this year.

If the media reported on the flu like it’s reporting this Wuhan Soup, we’d have the living standards of a socialist dump. Which we might have in a couple of year’s time anyway.

I know, it’s the measures which are keeping infections and deaths within limits, but I still think the world is going a little bit nutty now.

Joe Biden trounced Bernie Sanders with wins in Florida, Illinois and Arizona. It is becoming more evident that Sanders success in 2016 was more anti-Hillary than pro-Bernie. It foreshadows the equivalent lesson that Trump’s successvin 2016 probably had an element of anti-Hillary in it as well.
The pressure on Sanders to concede, especially in the light of party consensus and national need should be immense.
Sanders, however, is not really a party guy. And the Democrats, despite what the silly people claim, are not socialists (real socialists are even more aghast at that idea). He may decide to continue to “champion the movement”, one that clearly doesnt exist. This time, however, the stakes are too high. The new reality can’t tolerate pipe dreams.