#CONSERVATIVES ARE SO AFRAID OF WALZ

[maturemenoftvandfilms]

Mr. Walz

Featuring Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

Back in the late ‘90s, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and now Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, was a high school teacher and football coach in rural Minnesota. I attended Mankato West from 2000-2004, having Walz for 11th grade history. Being gay at the time, I initially expected to hate Walz, because he was a football coach and a hunter. But he was accepting and really friendly with me; with everyone really. He’s genuinely the goofy teacher that was in the hallway greeting every kid every morning, giving high fives and fist bumps. He and his wife, also a teacher at the school, provided vital support during my formative years. And to be honest, I thought he was cute.

He was in his late 30s and about 21 years my senior at that time, about my height, which is just shy of five foot-nine. He was chiselled like most middle-aged men with a gut. He dressed conservatively, usually a short sleeve solid colored shirt with a tee shirt under it and trousers which seemed to be a few sizes too small. I couldn’t help but find myself staring at his tightly held manhood, which showed a clear outline of his thick cock. That bulge had me daydreaming during our meets and school outings. I would jerk-off with this image in my mind every night.

After graduation, I didn’t see my ex-teacher again until I attended a campaign dinner in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. He instantly recognized me, smiling broadly and gave me a big hug. We’re talking 20-something years ago, and to have your 10th-grade geography teacher remember you after all of that time, it means something. I couldn’t call him Gov. Walz, because he will forever be Mr. Walz.

We talked a bit then, and a couple times throughout the evening. He asked me about what I was up to, if I was dating, the usual chit chat. I was so giddy to see Mr. Walz that I confessed that I had a crush on him in high school. I told him I thought about him every night when I jack off. How I use a big carrot up my ass, and pretend it was his dick. And I told him I knew he would never like me, that way, but I had to tell him.

Surprisingly, he suggested I should come over to his hotel, later, placing his hotel room card on the edge of the sink right next to me.

"Wait here, I'll have an agent escort you to my room in an hour." He said before leaving. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one had, so I quickly grabbed the key.

Sure enough, an hour later, a secret service agent escorted me to his hotel. The journey upstairs was unbearable. Reporters to dodge, people for the agent to nod away. By the time I got to Mr. Walz’s room, I was afraid he’d think I wasn’t’ interested, but when I entered the room, he was ready and waiting. The lights were dim, Mr. Walz was in a hotel bathrobe, and he’d ordered porn on the television.

"Is this what you really want?" I asked.

"More then anything." He replied.

I made the first move, leaning in to kiss him and as soon as our lips met, his arms went around me. Quickly, he started unbuttoning my shirt, unzipping my pants, and basically tearing my clothes off as he moved his tongue around inside my mouth. His hand was on my hard dick, feeling and testing the size.

"Oh, yeah." He moaned, as he ran his hand down my tender, sensitive cock before squatting.

With his mouth at my crotch, he ran his tongue up all seven inches, before gently pushing me towards the bed. On the bed, our bodies melded into one. His hard dick was teasing mine, as once again, our tongues found the other's mouth. Hands everywhere, as we hugged and rocked each other. Kissing my way down his chest, I left a trail of saliva all the way to his cock. Taking him in my mouth, I began to suck while I swirled my tongue around his boner before he started thrusting into my throat, making me gag. I guess he got pretty turned on by what I was doing to him as he turned me around and put us into 69 position.

As Mr. Walz took my dick in his mouth, I took his dick in mine. I worked on it with such skill that he began moaning deep inside his throat as he sucked my dick. And he could really suck; he knew how to please a man. I began to feel him starting to breathe rapidly and shake. I knew he was going to explode soon. I was getting close as well.

Wanting Mr. Walz to fuck me, I quickly seperated, and rolled off the bed leaving him laying there completely naked with a huge hard-on. Hurrying to my pants, I pulled a tube of lubrication out of his pocket before I bounded back to the bed. After telling him I wanted him to fuck me, I tensely watched as Mr. Walz applied the lubricate to his cock, knowing the pain I was about to feel. I couldn’t help but thinking back to my high school years when I first saw him. I had always wanted Mr. Walz to fuck me since then. Now was the time.

“You got a nice tight asshole.” Mr. Walz told me as he rubbed some of the KY onto my asshole.

He lifted my legs and stared me straight in the eyes as he guided the head of his cock to my ass. As soon as his dick made contact, he immediately thrust all 8 inches into me. I gasped loudly, so loudly in fact that I’m sure the people in the next room heard.

“I’m going to really open up your asshole.” Mr. Walz called out with a wicked smile on his face as he slowly started fucking me.

Noticing each time the fat head of his cock passed my hard prostate, pre-cum would squirt from the tip of my dick. He reached down and scooped it up with his finger, brought it to his mouth and licked it clean.

"Oh, man, that's good." He said, as he scooped up more, but I pulled his finger to his mouth, and sucked it in.

We smiled at each other before he leaned forward and kissed me deep, our tongues caressed each other, sharing my pre-cum. Then as we kissed he sent his cock plunging deeper into me. I arched my back as I was forced to take more cock deeper into my ass than ever before.

“Yes, fuck me, Mr. Walz.” I found myself saying when he broke our embrace, “Give it to me, Mr. Walz. Make me yours!”

And he did just that. Mr. Walz started fucking me hard and fast. I took each of the strokes of his his old manhood willingly. I wanted to give him total pleasure and I could tell from the far away look in his eye that the old man was as lost in me as I was in him. I knew he was getting close, and I didn’t want to stop him, so I didn’t say a word about pulling out. Having only had sex with his wife for all those years, he didn’t think of it either. Soon he was filling my ass with ropes of cum, and I felt it filling me up.

After we got off and caught our breath, he looked at me and we both started laughing and telling each other how glad we were that we'd just met up today.

[mariacallous]

The Conservative Party has a “weird” problem. Research organisation More In Common conducted 10 focus groups around the country on the Tory party and its leadership contest – and one of its headline findings is the party needs to seem more in line with regular voters, and to be a bit less “weird”.

That “weird” charge is a nightmarish one for any political movement to face, as Donald Trump is learning to his cost in the US presidential contest. Since Kamala Harris’s pick for vice president, Tim Walz, started using the “weird” label for team Trump – over their fixation on attacking “childless cat ladies“, and policing women’s bodies – the campaign has struggled to rebut the allegation.

America is much more steeped in the culture wars than Britain. Right-wing Americans and left-wing Americans get their news from completely different sources, and so hear completely different narratives. The country is far more polarised on social issues like LGBT rights and abortion. Trust is far lower. In America, engaging in so-called culture wars is necessary to capture some voters, even if it comes with the risk of looking weird.

It shouldn’t need saying, but Britain is not America. We still agree on much more than we disagree on. The UK public is overwhelmingly in favour of gay marriage and women’s right to access abortions – including a majority of Conservative voters, on both issues. The BBC is both the most accessed source of news and the most trusted news brand in the UK, across all age groups.

Voters of different parties largely agree on the top issues facing the UK: cost of living, the NHS, and the state of the economy – even if they disagree on how much of a priority immigration is. The messaging from the public couldn’t be much clearer: they want politicians who will get on with the boring stuff. They want public services to work better, they want better wages, and they’d like to be confident their children will be able to afford homes.

It is notable that everyone in More In Common’s focus groups voted Conservative in 2019, when Boris Johnson was in power and was hardly tiptoeing around being some kind of politically correct or “woke” icon. The people warning they find the Tories weird right now are not classic snowflakes – they are exactly the voters the party has lost.

All of which makes the decisions of some of the Conservative leadership contenders even more baffling than they first appear. The campaign trailer of Kemi Badenoch, ostensibly the front-runner in the contest, opened with an attack on the actor David Tennant, with Kemi Badenoch herself boldly stating she is “not afraid of Doctor Who, or whoever”.

Who is this stuff supposed to be for? It does not align at all with the priorities of Conservative voters, and so will surely just lead the party down another electoral dead end.

Elected Conservatives have become obsessed with the weirdness of US politics. Some of this may be self-serving: there is a lot of money to be earned on the US right-wing speaking circuit for retired British politicians, but they have to serve up the red meat that US Republicans want.

But some of it is simply the UK obsession with America and our “special relationship”, which leads politicians astray into thinking our politics are more similar than they are. This leads them in to assuming hot-button American political issues will play well here, when they go down like cold sick.

It leads to decisions like Tory leadership challenger Robert Jenrick saying he would vote for Donald Trump, a wildly unpopular man with UK voters. Most in the UK public barely watch the news, let alone follow politics closely. The very act of being in politics makes you “weird” – but the Conservatives risk taking it to a whole new level.

Unless they start listening to the voters actually living in the country, rather than looking to the US, they are set for a long time in opposition indeed.

[qnewsau]

Time to change direction on campaign for national issues

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/time-to-change-direction-on-campaign-for-national-issues/

Time to change direction on campaign for national issues

Since becoming Labor Leader in 2019, Anthony Albanese has broken promise after promise to the LGBTIQA+ community.

He has dumped the party’s Equality Portfolio, scrapped Labor’s commitment to an LGBTIQA+ Commissioner, broken his promise to protect LGBTIQA+ staff and students in religious schools, failed to fulfill his promise to introduce an LGBTIQA+ vilification law and failed to defend trans people from rising hate.

Most recently, he broke his promise to count LGBTIQA+ people in the Census, and then decided to include LGB people but not trans and intersex people, and then decided to include trans people but still not intersex people. 

Meanwhile, the Labor leader’s American counterparts, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, proudly tout their records of protecting the entire LGBTIQA+ community.  What’s wrong with the federal Labor Party? 

The Government’s excuse for its broken promises on schools and the Census is that reform would jeopardise Australia’s “social cohesion” and inflict a divisive debate on the LGBTIQA+ community. 

The condescension is astonishing. No-one asked the Government to decide what’s best for us. 

We want to be counted, not coddled.

Cohesion should be for everyone, not just those who discriminate.

The real reason Labor has betrayed us

The real reasons for Labor’s betrayal on the Census, schools and much else besides are three-fold.

Labor’s Catholic right is resurgent.

Members of Labor’s Catholic faction attended rallies against the proposed religious school reform and spoke against it.

If they are so willing to openly defy Labor policy publicly, imagine what damage they’re doing behind the scenes.

The second reason is the perception among Labor strategists that supporting LGBTIQA law reform will cost votes in Western Sydney and some regional areas.

Evidence this was a motivation can be found in the Government’s decision to release its Census announcement to Sky News before it told any of the experts and advocates who have been working with it on Census inclusion.

When this Labor Government speaks on LGBTIQA+ issues its message is for social conservatives, not us. 

Pandering to prejudice in Western Sydney has been a problem at least since Labor got behind John Howard’s same-sex marriage ban in 2004.

But it has taken an added urgency since the 2017 postal survey when some Western Sydney electorates voted strongly No.

In 2017 the Equality Campaign had an opportunity to directly challenge prejudice in Sydney’s west but made a deliberate decision not to, leaving it to drag down every subsequent bid for LGBTIQA law reform nationally and in NSW. 

That brings me to the third problem, weak and ineffective campaigning. 

Time to return to grassroots campaigning

The two most significant and successful Australian LGBTIQA law reforms since marriage equality have been Victoria’s conversion practices ban and Tasmania’s recognition of diverse genders.

Both reforms have set a new global standard and have been hailed around the world as landmarks. 

What also sets those two reforms apart is that they were championed by the people most affected.

Victorian conversion survivors and transgender Tasmanians weren’t just the face of reform, they conceptualised the problem, they wrote the legislation, they developed the messages, they led the advocacy and lobbying, and they educated the public. 

They weren’t afraid of the backlash their work sparked but had a plan for diffusing it. 

Their influence came from a peer-led approach and from grassroots support, not simply from trying to curry favour with politicians and government officials (the Tasmanian gender bill passed despite strident opposition from the then Liberal State Government).  

They never tried to make their issue a small target but wanted it to be big issue, demanding of political attention. 

This is the kind of campaigning that wins reform.

What a campaign on school discrimination should look like

At a national level, the campaign to make discrimination in religious schools illegal must be led by past and present LGBTIQA staff and students.

They should have the support they need from existing organisations to organise among themselves, develop their own strategy and communications, do their own advocacy and lobbying, and, if they wish, have their demands stride the national stage.

I would also advise campaigners against discrimination in schools to take a leaf out of the marriage campaign’s book and focus on advocacy at the local level, especially in electorates where the local MP can be won over. 

Existing organisations should take a step back and let those most affected take the reins, just as Equality Tasmania did when it allowed trans advocacy group, Transforming Tasmania, to lead on gender recognition.

I can’t guarantee a grassroots approach will achieve reform in the current political environment, but given we’re no closer after all these years, it makes sense to give it a try.  

Labor can’t take our votes for granted

What about our inclusion in the Census, vilification protections, and all the other promises Labor has broken? 

Clearly, the Government’s problem is not just with one particular reform, but with all of them.

Yes, it has allocated some funds to develop a plan to address our health needs and help LGBTIQA+ people overseas, but it repeatedly balks at meaningful law and policy reform.

Clearly, there is a systemic problem requiring a tough, unsentimental campaign response.

We need to show Labor that it will lose votes if it continues to betray us.

A Just.Equal Australia survey of LGBTIQA+ voters after the last election showed 21% had shifted allegiance from Labor to the Greens and Teals because of Labor’s support for Scott Morrison’s anti-LGBTIQA+ Religious Discrimination Bill.

It’s time to remind Labor MPs, particularly those in inner-city seats with small margins, that betraying our community has serious consequences.

Our community has done this many times before, for example, when Labor supported John Howard’s same-sex marriage ban in 2004. 

It’s time to do it again.

It’s time to warn Labor not to take us for granted.

-Rodney Croome is a spokesperson for Just.Equal Australia

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[claremal-one]

After Minneapolis, Can Trump’s Law-And-Order Strategy Work?

When President Trump delivered his inaugural address in 2017, it was in an unfamiliar style. Gone was the jokey off-handedness of Trump-on-the-trail. In a stilted, elegiac tone the freshly-minted president spoke of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” and “young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.” The content of the speech was familiar, though: Trump would bring America back from the brink. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” President George W. Bush called it “some weird shit.”

Trump ran on law and order — “I am the law and order candidate” he helpfully explained — even if empirical evidence suggested nothing was wrong with the law and order Americans were already living under. The country’s rates of violent crime were trending downward when he ran — falling 51 percent between 1993 and 2018 — and the economy was churning along, but Trump tapped into some Americans’ dissatisfaction with the status quo. Law and order was about the restoration of a certain social configuration favorable to white Americans as much as it was a concern with crime.

As the strange election year that is 2020 marches on, Trump has returned to his 2016 rhetoric, but it may register differently. Late Thursday night, Minneapolis residents burned down a police station after the death of George Floyd, a black man in police custody. The president tweeted in response that, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

It was a familiar law and order message from Trump. But he tweeted it into an unfamiliar America: Over 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in the past few months. One out of every four workers has filed for unemployment. As the country lives through actual American carnage, will Trump’s law and order message resonate as it once did? Or will the bleak realities of 2020 prove inhospitable to the man who once proclaimed, “I alone can fix it”?

In 2016, voters seemed excited by Trump’s verbal promiscuity, the lurid way that he painted the state of the nation. In his telling, America had descended into disarray thanks to porous borders that allowed in terrorists and job-stealing immigrants. He was engaging, if not accurate (the economy was doing well in many parts of the country and President Obama had actually deported more immigrants who were living in the country illegally than previous administrations). Pew Research surveys show that 2016 Trump supporters ranked the economy, terrorism, and immigration, along with foreign policy, as the most pressing issues of the election. And according to another Pew survey, 78 percent of voters who supported Trump in 2016 felt crime had gotten worse since 2008.

Trump’s law and order framework was a sturdy way for him to talk about a more elusive idea — nostalgia for a mid century America with robust domestic manufacturing and a clearly-defined, if racist, social order. While Trump is no wonk and couldn’t talk particularly compellingly about globalization, the consolidation of industry and the widening gap between CEO and worker pay, he could talk about “the good old days” when you could smack someone around. It evoked something deep, that call for everything and everyone in their proper place.

The law and order message might not sit so well in 2020. The country has now lived through years of controversies over video-taped killings by police, and the pandemic makes the world feel more chaotic day by day. We’ll have to wait to see the social and political reaction to the demonstrations in Minnesota, but there might be more sympathy for the turbulent feelings that make people riot or protest. While many will still roundly condemn looting, it’s perhaps easier for a greater number of us to imagine the kind of jagged anger — grief, if we’re being concise about it — that causes it than it was four years ago.

Understanding the catharsis of looting — if not approving of the act — is something that has long eluded the understanding of white America, including liberal white America. “Shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters” was the order from Chicago’s white, Democratic Mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 riots following Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. King, for his part, called riots, “the language of the unheard.” Even Obama struggled with his reaction to the Ferguson, Missouri riots of 2014, receiving criticism from voices on the black left when he said he had “no sympathy at all for destroying your own communities.” He later said he would have done some things differently in his response to the Ferguson crisis, writ large.

Minnesota has also proven a difficult testing ground for Trump’s return to law and order rhetoric. Reaction to the violence in the state — and the killing of Floyd — has unfolded somewhat differently than past violent deaths in police custody. Police chiefs from around the country swiftly condemned the officer who killed Floyd. Even as police on the ground in Minneapolis arrested a black journalist on live TV, the mayor and governor — both Democrats — called for calm while saying they understood and were sympathetic to the anger behind the rioting. Fox News guests and analysts condemned the officer’s actions, though it remains to be seen how conservative media and the right will react to the ongoing protests and violence. In a YouGov poll, 78 percent of surveyed adults thought the officer in the Floyd case should be arrested (he was on Friday afternoon).

It seems unlikely, though, that Trump will easily give up the race-baiting language of “thugs” and the like. For Trump, who is famously ideologically flexible, the idea of law and order is perhaps his deepest-held, most sincere political belief. In 1989, in the midst of the Central Park Five controversy, when five black and Latino men were accused of the brutal rape of a white jogger, he took out full-page advertisements in New York City newspapers to decry waffling over the punishment of the men. (Later, they were famously found to have been wrongly convicted). “What has happened to law and order, to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and families?” Trump wrote. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them, I am looking to punish them,” he said of the alleged criminals. “I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.”

In 2016, Trump was able to echo these sentiments from 1989 easily — he was on the outside looking in. But in 2020 it will take more dexterity to run a campaign angry at authority when he is the authority. Once you have promised to end an imagined carnage, only to encounter actual death and societal destruction, the misdirection of your talking points risks exposure. But on this point, Trump has always been true to himself: He is the law and order candidate once again.

from Clare Malone – FiveThirtyEight https://ift.tt/3dgiwP9 via https://ift.tt/1B8lJZR

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

When President Trump delivered his inaugural address in 2017, it was in an unfamiliar style. Gone was the jokey off-handedness of Trump-on-the-trail. In a stilted, elegiac tone the freshly-minted president spoke of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” and “young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge.” The content of the speech was familiar, though: Trump would bring America back from the brink. “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” President George W. Bush called it “some weird shit.”

Trump ran on law and order — “I am the law and order candidate” he helpfully explained — even if empirical evidence suggested nothing was wrong with the law and order Americans were already living under. The country’s rates of violent crime were trending downward when he ran — falling 51 percent between 1993 and 2018 — and the economy was churning along, but Trump tapped into some Americans’ dissatisfaction with the status quo. Law and order was about the restoration of a certain social configuration favorable to white Americans as much as it was a concern with crime.

As the strange election year that is 2020 marches on, Trump has returned to his 2016 rhetoric, but it may register differently. Late Thursday night, Minneapolis residents burned down a police station after the death of George Floyd, a black man in police custody. The president tweeted in response that, “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”

It was a familiar law and order message from Trump. But he tweeted it into an unfamiliar America: Over 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in the past few months. One out of every four workers has filed for unemployment. As the country lives through actual American carnage, will Trump’s law and order message resonate as it once did? Or will the bleak realities of 2020 prove inhospitable to the man who once proclaimed, “I alone can fix it”?

In 2016, voters seemed excited by Trump’s verbal promiscuity, the lurid way that he painted the state of the nation. In his telling, America had descended into disarray thanks to porous borders that allowed in terrorists and job-stealing immigrants. He was engaging, if not accurate (the economy was doing well in many parts of the country and President Obama had actually deported more immigrants who were living in the country illegally than previous administrations). Pew Research surveys show that 2016 Trump supporters ranked the economy, terrorism, and immigration, along with foreign policy, as the most pressing issues of the election. And according to another Pew survey, 78 percent of voters who supported Trump in 2016 felt crime had gotten worse since 2008.

Trump’s law and order framework was a sturdy way for him to talk about a more elusive idea — nostalgia for a mid century America with robust domestic manufacturing and a clearly-defined, if racist, social order. While Trump is no wonk and couldn’t talk particularly compellingly about globalization, the consolidation of industry and the widening gap between CEO and worker pay, he could talk about “the good old days” when you could smack someone around. It evoked something deep, that call for everything and everyone in their proper place.

The law and order message might not sit so well in 2020. The country has now lived through years of controversies over video-taped killings by police, and the pandemic makes the world feel more chaotic day by day. We’ll have to wait to see the social and political reaction to the demonstrations in Minnesota, but there might be more sympathy for the turbulent feelings that make people riot or protest. While many will still roundly condemn looting, it’s perhaps easier for a greater number of us to imagine the kind of jagged anger — grief, if we’re being concise about it — that causes it than it was four years ago.

Understanding the catharsis of looting — if not approving of the act — is something that has long eluded the understanding of white America, including liberal white America. “Shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim looters” was the order from Chicago’s white, Democratic Mayor Richard Daley during the 1968 riots following Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination. King, for his part, called riots, “the language of the unheard.” Even Obama struggled with his reaction to the Ferguson, Missouri riots of 2014, receiving criticism from voices on the black left when he said he had “no sympathy at all for destroying your own communities.” He later said he would have done some things differently in his response to the Ferguson crisis, writ large.

Minnesota has also proven a difficult testing ground for Trump’s return to law and order rhetoric. Reaction to the violence in the state — and the killing of Floyd — has unfolded somewhat differently than past violent deaths in police custody. Police chiefs from around the country swiftly condemned the officer who killed Floyd. Even as police on the ground in Minneapolis arrested a black journalist on live TV, the mayor and governor — both Democrats — called for calm while saying they understood and were sympathetic to the anger behind the rioting. Fox News guests and analysts condemned the officer’s actions, though it remains to be seen how conservative media and the right will react to the ongoing protests and violence. In a YouGov poll, 78 percent of surveyed adults thought the officer in the Floyd case should be arrested (he was on Friday afternoon).

It seems unlikely, though, that Trump will easily give up the race-baiting language of “thugs” and the like. For Trump, who is famously ideologically flexible, the idea of law and order is perhaps his deepest-held, most sincere political belief. In 1989, in the midst of the Central Park Five controversy, when five black and Latino men were accused of the brutal rape of a white jogger, he took out full-page advertisements in New York City newspapers to decry waffling over the punishment of the men. (Later, they were famously found to have been wrongly convicted). “What has happened to law and order, to the neighborhood cop we all trusted to safeguard our homes and families?” Trump wrote. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them, I am looking to punish them,” he said of the alleged criminals. “I no longer want to understand their anger. I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.”

In 2016, Trump was able to echo these sentiments from 1989 easily — he was on the outside looking in. But in 2020 it will take more dexterity to run a campaign angry at authority when he is the authority. Once you have promised to end an imagined carnage, only to encounter actual death and societal destruction, the misdirection of your talking points risks exposure. But on this point, Trump has always been true to himself: He is the law and order candidate once again.

[fullspectrum-cbd-oil]

The U.S. Weighs the Grim Math of Death vs. the Economy

Hollstadt Consulting CEO Molly Jungbauer has had to let go 30 of the 150 employees at her St. Paul, Minnesota firm to weather the drop in revenue from travel industry clients because of the coronavirus.

She’s worried about her daughter, who lives in New York and has the disease. But she also worries that shutting the economy with open-ended stay-at-home orders could have an “irreversible” impact.

So she was relieved to hear Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s plan last week: clamp down on commerce and social activity now but then reopen the state for business by May 4. “It is nice to know that we have somewhat of an end date,” she said.

Coronavirus shut-downs could lop 25% or more from U.S. output, some economists forecast, throwing tens of millions of Americans out of work. (For a graphic, please see https://reut.rs/2QWQ4J3) The U.S. government and the Fed are mounting what could be a $6 trillion economic rescue.

And elected U.S. politicians entrusted with public welfare are making calculations centered around the question: How many possibly preventable deaths are acceptable, as weighed against millions of jobs lost and trillions of dollars of economic output foregone?

Declaring the cure can’t be worse than the disease, President Donald Trump has said that by April 12, he wanted churches all over the country to be “packed” with Easter celebrants. On Sunday, Trump backed away from that goal by extending social distancing guidelines to April 30.

More testing is critical, Trump advisor Stephen Moore told Reuters.

“Once you have testing you can open up the economy,” he said. South Korea has tested a much bigger portion of its citizens than the United States has, allowing it to reduce infections and without stopping its economy. The U.S. has ramped up its capacity in recent weeks, though some states are making bigger inroads than others.

Also key, Moore said, is understanding if new cases are rising as fast in the Midwest as on the coasts, and if more people can, like the hundreds of thousands of workers at FedEx still on the job, practice social distancing and still work.

“You kind of have to look at the businesses that are running,” Moore said.

BUCKLE UP, MINNESOTA

U.S. state and local officials are doing their own calculus.

“We will not put a dollar figure on human lives,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said. Almost half of the 130,000 U.S. cases to date have appeared in New York, where some hospitals are overwhelmed with critically-ill patients.

Other governors in states with fewer cases are forging ahead with plans to try to limit both deaths and economic damage.

On Wednesday, Walz – who is self-quarantining after possible exposure – told Minnesotans that models project an eventual 2.4 million infections statewide.

If allowed to spread unchecked now, he said, as many as 74,000 Minnesotans could die because too few hospital beds and ventilators means patients won’t get the medical care they need.

Economically, he said, the state can’t afford to stay shut for a year or more until a vaccine is developed, an approach an influential Imperial College study recommends.

So Walz is imposing a strict “stay-at-home” order for two weeks and a more relaxed version for a few weeks after that, to give hospitals the time to prepare. Epidemiologists refer to this as “flattening the curve.”

“I don’t believe it’s prudent to try to shelter in place until a vaccine is there,” Walz said. “I’m asking you to buckle it up for a few more weeks here.”

Even that will be painful: state officials estimate 28% of Minnesotans will be temporarily jobless for the next two weeks, with about 40% of those without any form of paid leave.

Once businesses and schools reopen, Walz hopes to use testing and targeted quarantines to keep new cases in check.

But he acknowledged there will be more deaths. “It’s agonizing and I find it nearly unacceptable,” he said. “My job is to reduce it down.”

Coronavirus is about ten times deadlier than the flu, killing one of every hundred that get it, according to Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert. Given Walz’s estimate of 2.4 million Minnesota residents infected, that means 24,000 dead.

So far there have been 503 cases and nine deaths in the state.

FALSE TRADEOFF

For a growing chorus of economists, the notion of weighing deaths against the economy is fundamentally flawed.

“One can do those types of quite gruesome calculations” said MIT economist Emil Verner. But evidence suggests “that in some sense, that’s a false tradeoff,” he said.

Verner last week co-authored a paper about the response to the 1918 flu epidemic and found that cities that restricted public gatherings sooner and longer had fewer deaths – and ultimately emerged from the pandemic with stronger economic growth.

“Saving lives and saving the economy are not in conflict right now,” former Fed Chair Janet Yellen and more than 30 other current and former policymakers and economists wrote in a joint statement published earlier this week.

Paul Winfree, director of economic policy studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, agrees that easing restrictions too early could be damaging. But, he said, allowing the downturn to deepen into a depression would ultimately negatively impact health.

“The White House is starting to weigh the long and short term health consequences of coronavirus and mitigation…(and) they are hearing from the business community that there needs to be some level of certainty,” he said.

The question remains if the American consumer, who is responsible for about two-thirds of U.S. GDP, will be confident enough to go to crowded malls and cozy restaurants if the death toll is still rising.

UCLA professor Andy Atkeson says that though lifting lockdowns may seem like an economic shot in the arm, doing so could let infections shoot right back up again.

“Americans would lock themselves down, afraid to go out to shop and work given the illness and death around them,” Atkeson wrote.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir and Jeff Mason, additional reporting by Heather Timmons; Editing by Heather Timmons and Edward Tobin)

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