March 27: 3,026 Cases of COVID 19 in Illinois

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. JB Pritzker has ordered Illinois residents to stay at home. Executive Order No. 10 requires all residents to stay home, with exceptions for essential needs or business activities. Gatherings of 10 people or more are prohibited. The order extends through April 7, 2020.

 

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Illinois Test Results

Positive

3,026 (2,538    3-26-2020)

Deaths

34  (26  3-26-2020)

Total Persons Tested*

21,542  (16,631 3-26-2020)

_{*Total number of people reported electronically for testing of COVID-19 at IDPH, commercial or hospital laboratories. Deaths are included in the number of positive cases
All numbers displayed are provisional and subject to change.}
Information regarding the number of people under investigation updated on 3/27/2020.
Information to be updated daily.

COVID-19 Illinois Positive Cases

What is the status of the Defense Production Act?

Day after day, Trump has said different things about ventilators and the Defense Production Act

Ben Werschkul

DC Producer

,

Yahoo Finance•March 27, 2020

Ad: 26s

Last Wednesday, March 18, President Trump walked into the White House briefing room at 12:06 pm with a significant announcement.

“We'll be invoking the Defense Production Act, just in case we need it. In other words, I think you all know what it is, and it can do a lot of good things if we need it. And we will – we will have it all completed, signing it in just a little while. Right after I'm finished with this conference, I'll be signing it. It's prepared to go. So we will be invoking the Defense Production Act.”

Hours later, he seemed to backtrack in a tweet about whether the law, which gives him the ability to compel companies to manufacture critically needed items in times of national need, had actually been invoked.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

I only signed the Defense Production Act to combat the Chinese Virus should we need to invoke it in a worst case scenario in the future. Hopefully there will be no need, but we are all in this TOGETHER!

207K

4:37 PM - Mar 18, 2020

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90.5K people are talking about this

The next day, March 19, he clarified a bit during the daily coronavirus task force briefing.

Q: Mr. President, if I could, a question for you and then a question for Dr. Hahn. You “enabled” – I guess, is probably the best way to put it – the Defense Production Act yesterday, but you didn’t pull the trigger on it.

THE PRESIDENT: No, because we hope we're not going to need that.

Later in the briefing, he added this:

Q: Under what conditions would you put the Defense Production Act into action?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, if we were desperately in need of something – and we, frankly, will know about that very shortly. We want to be ahead of – we don't want to do it as it happens but before it happens. We're going to know a lot over the next two or three days. We'll know a lot.

The next morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a call with Trump and asked him to invoke the act. Schumer’s spokesman later told reporters, using the acronym for President of the United States, that "POTUS told Schumer he would, and then POTUS yelled to someone in his office to do it now."

At the daily briefing later that day, on March 20, Trump was again saying he had “invoked” the act.

Q: You had a call with Senator Schumer. He says you've now agreed to invoke the Defense Production Act to actually make those medical supplies that hospitals say are in severe shortage. So two questions: Is that what you're doing now?

THE PRESIDENT: It is. I did it yesterday. We invoked it, I think, the day before we signed it – the evening of the day before – and invoked it yesterday. We have a lot of people working very hard to do ventilators and various other things. Yes.

The next day, on March 21, Trump clarified again that the White House had not actually compelled any companies using the act.

Q: One of the things we're hearing from governors: They can't find supplies and prices have gone up. So you've talked about the act, sir, but you have not yet compelled any companies. Why not?

THE PRESIDENT: Because we have so many companies making so many products – every product that you mentioned, plus ventilators and everything else. We have car companies – without having to use the act. If I don't have to use – specifically, we have the act to use, in case we need it. But we have so many things being made right now by so many – they've just stepped up.

A few days later, on March 23, he said he invoked the act in regard to vital medical equipment.

Earlier today, I signed an executive order invoking presidential authority under Section 4512 of the Defense Production Act to prohibit the hoarding of vital medical equipment and supplies such as hand sanitizers, face masks, and personal protective equipment.

The next day, he tweeted that that act was in “full force.”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

The Defense Production Act is in full force, but haven’t had to use it because no one has said NO! Millions of masks coming as back up to States.

107K

7:00 AM - Mar 24, 2020

By March 25, he was describing it as a “negotiating tool” at a White House briefing.

I spoke to the governor – Governor Cuomo – last night and this morning, and he mentioned that, in his remarks, that he's using the – that we are using – and I think he feels, because he understands negotiation – he thinks we're using very appropriately the Defense Production Act. And we are. We're using it where needed. It's a great point of leverage; it's a great negotiating tool.

The next day, March 26, he repeated, saying “We use it as leverage.”

$1 billion for Defense Production Act procurement.  We are, as you know, using the Act, but we use it only when necessary. We use it as leverage.  We generally don't have to use it to accomplish what we want to accomplish.

On March 27 Trump repeatedly tweeted at General Motors and again suggested he might invoke the act.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

As usual with “this” General Motors, things just never seem to work out. They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, “very quickly”. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar. Always a mess with Mary B. Invoke “P”.

61.5K

10:16 AM - Mar 27, 2020

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Invoke “P” means Defense Production Act!

49.8K

10:29 AM - Mar 27, 2020

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Trump’s attacks come as GM and Ford both announced this week that they are working with companies to help boost ventilator production. And soon after Trump’s first tweet, GM and Ventec announced they’ll build ventilators at the automaker’s parts plant in Indiana. GM sent Yahoo Finance this statement:

Ventec Life Systems and General Motors have been working around the clock to implement plans to build more critical care ventilators. With GM’s support, Ventec is now planning exponentially higher ventilator production as fast as possible.

Ben Werschkul is a producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.

Above is from:

A very bleak view of 2021 under Trump

Trump has never been worse — but his approval is surging. Why?

Damon Linker

,

The Week•March 27, 2020

My estimation of President Trump has never been lower than it is right now. And his approval rating has never been higher.

That disjunct has become familiar to lots of liberal-leaning journalists, intellectuals, and academics over the past three years. Though this hasn't kept plenty of them from trying to deny or explain it away. Unwaveringly convinced that the president and his party are inept, corrupt, ignorant, and brutally callous, they have written and published article after article under headlines like, "This is the end of the Trump presidency."

We saw this when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. It happened again in the months surrounding the midterm elections, when Republicans took a big hit in Congress and lost control of the House. The headlines reappeared repeatedly before and during Trump's impeachment trial and subsequent acquittal. And we've seen it in the midst of a global pandemic, the seriousness of which the president at first dismissed, then grudgingly conceded, and now seems eager to deny once again, this time in the name of "restarting the economy."

Over and over again, those who report on and analyze politics at close range have documented the president's lies, exposed his schemes to enrich himself, taken note of his errors and their consequences, and highlighted his incompetence and cruelty — and at every step of the way they have assumed this would make a political difference. But it hasn't.

Maybe it's time to recognize that it won't.

Accepting this is hard. Journalists, academics, and intellectuals tend to be idealists. They went into this line of work not because they wanted to be rich but because they wanted to make the world a better place in some way. This doesn't mean their ideas on improving things would always have positive outcomes if they were enacted, or that their favored policy proposals deserve to take priority in our public life. Not at all. But it does mean they tend to assume that most people will recoil from outright lies, deception, malice, injustice, sleaze, and thuggish imbecility when it is exposed and demonstrated to them.

But maybe that isn't true.

Maybe most of what has been written about the president and his party in the mainstream media is true — and yet it won't mean that this produces "the end of the Trump presidency" at all. Maybe enough Americans in enough states just don't care. Or maybe enough of them do care but in an affirmative way. They like politics conducted like pro-wrestling. They smile at the vulgarity. They approve of a president who acts and thinks like a mob boss and prefer a politics of clientalistic corruption to an administrative state of well-trained experts and bureaucrats who aspire to scrupulous competence and ideological neutrality (while sometimes falling short of achieving it). Maybe instead of responding to evidence that Trump is a clownish demagogue, they respond by saying, "Good, and thanks for noticing."

Maybe they like these things because they're Republicans and Republicans benefit from the Republican president ruthlessly pursuing policies that Republicans want. (Every faction of the GOP has enjoyed victories and gains during the Trump administration.) Maybe they also like these things because they follow politics for the entertainment and the Trump presidency is fun. He spews rhetorical sulfuric acid at their political and cultural enemies, and he does it with relish and humor. And the victims of his vitriol typically respond by flying off into an indignant, self-important, and self-defeating rage. What could be politically sweeter than that?

Now let me be clear: This is bad. Very bad. It means that a large and politically potent segment of the American public is both actively contemptuous of expertise, specialized knowledge, and the effort to combat political corruption when it benefits them, and beyond the reach of being persuaded otherwise.

It will of course be even worse if they happen to get their president re-elected.

In that case, America's relative decline in the world will not only continue apace (as it almost surely would under any president at this point) but be managed terribly. We'll still be able to bully weaker countries to get our way for a while. But anything resembling the "American century" will be over and done. We'll be a declining hegemon in a world increasingly dominated by rising regional powers while being led by a carnival barker who takes his cues entirely from rabblerousing media personalities who know and care nothing about the wider world. Having turned ourselves into global laughingstocks, other countries will increasingly go their own way, bypassing the United States on trade and alliances and other international pursuits as we slowly founder.

At home our country will be marked by crumbling infrastructure and a tottering system of health-care provision to an aging and unhealthy population. Our government will be sagging under a crushing debt burden, our former efforts to soften the blows of capitalism's creative destruction being dismantled along with the regulatory regime that sought to protect citizens against externalities of corporate greed. Our courts will be dominated by right-wing Social Darwinists, with civil liberties in retreat and our public life polluted by a miasma of lies and disinformation designed to protect the powerful from oversight. Meanwhile "red" America will cheer it on, believing our national greatness has been restored and wildly entertained by nasty presidential tweets trolling the libs, while Trump and his party actively screw the disloyal "blue" states, enriching themselves along the way.

In such a pitch-black prophesy, what's the opposition to do?

Of course it still needs to try and win national elections. But if such efforts fail, one option would be for it to continue doing what it has for these past three years — allowing itself to be continually provoked into lashing out, living in a fantasy that voters can be persuaded to eject the ringmaster from his place at the center of the circus, and giving in to conspiracies to explain how we got here.

But there's another way to respond — and that is to disconnect from the spectacle. Use America's federalist system to circle the wagons, creating an archipelago of cities and suburbs that seek to govern themselves the way the country as a whole attempted to do through the middle decades of the 20th century: with a commitment to helping those less fortunate and protecting the vulnerable from harm, to bringing policy expertise to bear on solving common problems, and to building a system of public institutions that aspire to fairness for all.

This is really no solution and certainly nothing to romanticize. It would be a concession to our civic brokenness, a giving in to how divided we are as a polity, and how disinclined to find common ground. In that respect it could well intensify our divisions further. It would also demonstrate beyond any doubt that the time for grand, ambitious national projects — like fighting climate change in a systematic way or overhauling the health-care system to make it more equitable — is behind us. The most that liberals could hope for in such a scenario would be regional accomplishments that may well feel like little more than well-managed defeats.

But really, what's the alternative when contemplating the future of the center-left in a country that re-elects Donald Trump to the presidency? Continuing to jump up and down, pointing at the president while screaming, "Look at how bad he is!," while nearly half the country rolls its eyes and turns its backs in indifference?

Wake-up American liberals: We have no one to save but ourselves.

Above is from:  https://news.yahoo.com/trump-never-worse-approval-surging-095500857.html