Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

Find out, with our April 8, 2020 episode!

As per tradition, it was the day David Waldman reserves a chair and facemask for Elijah. It was also a Wednesday, the day David reserves for Greg Dworkin, who traditionally visits via Skype.

Dateline Somalia: A nation ravaged by pirates and rampant corruption, a population in anarchy as aid to those in need is commandeered by competing warlords for their own profit. Civilization crumbles into savagery. Back in the US, agents are seizing masks and other coronavirus supplies without a word, selling it to GOP-connected middlemen, intercepting, seizing, and "outbidding" the sales from those middlemen, then selling the gear thus seized BACK to those same middlemen in a victory for the free market. Of course these medical supplies aren’t counterfeit, are they? That would be Un-American. We’ll sue!

Barbados knows from pirates. The US introduces them to extortion after Rihanna tried to run the blockade.

Hydroxychloroquine could cause cardiac arrests. Hell, COVID-19 could cause cardiac arrests, so who  needs any more? Donald Trump does, because he and his voters need to feel smarter than doctors, and if Trump finds only one tenuous connection to one dubious success, well, that’s better than nothing. Also: money.

Donald Trump broke the agencies that were supposed to stop the Covid-19 epidemic and is killing all the watchdogs. The people who knew all along it was a hoax, will soon come to the conclusion that they knew along this was big trouble. (Unless they are already dead.) Will those people still vote for Trump, once they know this is all Donald’s fault? Maybe.

Bernie Sanders is correct as usual. The second most important vote of our lifetime has to be taken seriously, right now. Yesterday, the Wisconsin Republican party risked thousands of Democratic lives and even sacrificed a few of their own in what could be a template for November. It will take a while to figure out what just happened.

It is no longer infrastructure week, at least for a while, as Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell make Phase 4 happen remotely.