[guest post by JVW]

You guys caught the pun in the headline, right?

Item Uno: I don’t believe we have mentioned the horrible shooting at the Milwaukee Molson/Coors (or, as the locals know it, Miller) plant which took place on Wednesday afternoon. A staff electrician, one Anthony Ferrill, shot to death five co-workers before killing himself. As usual, the website Heavy has the raw details without any attempt to censor the more controversial parts. Many on the right are grousing that this mass killing is not receiving all that much attention because Ferrill was African-American and may have been an Elizabeth Warren supporter — if he shared his wife’s political preferences — and this doesn’t fit the preferred media narrative of the white MAGA guy prone to gun violence.

Item Zwei: the Coronavirus continues to wreck havoc worldwide. Iran no longer vigorously denies that the virus has hit its citizens much harder than they had originally reported. Unsurprisingly, the virus has made its presence known on the West Coast of the U.S. This map is tracking the reported cases but at this moment has not been updated to include recent reports of the first afflicted patient in Oregon. Meanwhile, the stock market is of course taking a beating, once again calling into question our deep economic entanglement with China, similar to the questions that we had and then blithely tabeled for seventeen years after suffering through the SARS epidemic.

Item Trois: Joe Biden’s campaign is allegedly on the upswing in South Carolina after a no-more-disastrous-than-the-rest-of-the-candidates showing in the debate earlier this week. The Never Bernie faction among the Democrats is counting on a huge Biden win there to arrest Senator Stalin’s momentum, though at least one poll suggests it could be close which would probably be considered a victory of sorts for everybody’s favorite cranky old Marxist. Meanwhile, Fauxcahontas’s possible second-place finish in California will probably not rescue her campaign if on the same evening she loses to her northern neighbor in her home state of Massachusetts, which is a strong possibility.

Item Négy: Super Tuesday is coming up. I want to write more about this over the weekend, but I hope no Californian here is considering voting for the awful Proposition 13, one of those awful unholy alliances between unions, builders, the education establishment, and taxaholics. I will also announce for whom I will be voting in the Presidential primary (oh, what’s the use: you all know I am voting for My Little Aloha Sweetie on what will probably be her final day in the race).

Have an enjoyable weekend everybody.

– JVW

As the Democrats continue to hammer the stock market, it’s worth contemplating the importance of the credibility of an administration during a global pandemic. Big Media is not perfect, but in a situation like this the news media tends to perform a valuable function in terms of correcting misinformation and spreading accurate information. Calling the media “fake” and suggesting that people ignore it could actually be dangerous.

This morning I saw a couple of tweets. The first is Mick Mulvaney suggesting Americans should turn off their televisions for 24 hours.

Here's Mike Mulvaney at CPAC characterizing coronavirus coverage as "an attempt to bring down the president" and blaming the media for the stock market stump pic.twitter.com/a747Inf2ky

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 28, 2020

I would suggest that paying attention to current events is increasingly important during a pandemic.

National Economic Council head Larry Kudlow says the Trump administration has “contained” the “caronavirus”, while the CDC has said of a spread of the virus in the U.S.: “It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen.”

Americans will have to decide whether the Trump administration and its top officials like Kudlow would be more likely to put Donald Trump’s interests above those of the United States, and whether they would say false things to calm markets and benefit Trump politically. There is a rich history of material from the past three years with which Americans could make such a decision. A lot of it is in books.

Hey, you know what? Maybe Americans should turn off their televisions for 24 hours, and read one of those books.