customer quilt done, champagne & puffy things

Current US COVID-19 deaths:  209,208

                  Yesterday:  208,483

And for those of you who think the current pandemic has been handled well, this is a thoroughly frightening read (I know it’s long, but well worth it):

Months before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed by covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.

In April, Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone recently from Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted Congress. “I just couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.”

How did a Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time at consulting and investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots. Kushner, he was told, was looking for young generalists who could work long hours for no pay. “I was torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said. “But it was such an unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So in March he volunteered for the White House covid-19 Supply-Chain Task Force, and drove to Washington.

On his first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in their twenties, mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in procurement or medical issues. He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to be auxiliaries supporting the government’s procurement team. “We were the team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.” The volunteers were tasked with finding desperately needed medical supplies using only their personal laptops and private e-mail accounts.

 

As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

Kennedy believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in order to sidestep government experts and thereby “control the narrative.” He said that Brad Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task force, pressured him to create a model fudging the projected number of fatalities; Smith wanted the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S. deaths, claiming that the experts’ models were “too severe.” Kennedy said that he told Smith, “I don’t know the first thing about disease modelling,” and declined the assignment. (A spokesman said that Smith did not recall the conversation.) To date, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died.

The volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from the President’s friends and supporters. According to Kennedy, the group paid special attention to Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality. Pirro, Kennedy said, was “particularly aggressive,” and demanded that masks be shipped to a hospital she favored. The volunteers were also told to direct millions of dollars’ worth of supplies to only five preselected distributors. Kennedy was asked to draft a justification for this decision, but refused. “Hundreds of people were sending e-mails every day offering P.P.E.,” he said, but no one in charge responded effectively. “We were super frustrated we couldn’t get the government to do more.”

In the end, the task force failed to procure enough equipment, leaving medical workers, including Kennedy’s cousin, to improvise by wearing garbage bags and makeshift or pre-worn masks. States were left to fend for themselves, bidding against one another for scarce supplies. Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as “a marketing genius,” because, Kennedy said they’d told him, “he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.” The response was in line with what Kennedy calls the White House mantra: that government doesn’t work, and “that the worst thing we could do was step on the toes of the private sector.”

Kushner came by the fema office a few times, once to ask the flailing volunteers what three things they most needed, and promising fixes by the end of the day. He had “an air of self-importance,” Kennedy recalled. “But I never saw a single thing that Kushner promised change.” After two or three weeks of growing distress, Kennedy wrote his complaint, addressing it to the House Oversight Committee, hoping that Congress would step in. Meanwhile, the task force stopped meeting in person, because a member tested positive for covid-19. In April, Kennedy quit, and he has since gone to work on the Democrats’ 2020 election efforts. He decided to defy the N.D.A., which he does not think can legally stifle him from expressing his opinion, and he is featured in a new documentary, “Totally Under Control,” from the director Alex Gibney. Kennedy said, “If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.” The Administration’s coronavirus response, he said, “was like a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.’’ (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/a-young-kennedy-in-kushnerland-turned-whistle-blower?fbclid=IwAR146u4ezfGzerubDa4I7DRhPDhHFqTNWdwrlEDyDfFy9anJUYJ_i2szpRM)

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I think it was still dark when Michael left for golf on Saturday (9/26).  I picked up my last free bagel and then settled in to get my blog out.  Once that was done, I finished off the second half of my customer quilt.  Due to the pattern of quilting, I had a lot of ends to tie in for such a small quilt, but by mid-afternoon, it was done:  

The back is almost as pretty as the front…

and for such a simple pattern, I think it is a beautiful quilt.  

I got the wire for quilt hanging threaded through the library quilt and it is now hanging in my front hall.  And you know something?  The more I look at this quilt…the more I like it!  You know, I had someone ask me why I continued to collect reading sayings when I didn’t think the head librarian at Indian Land would go for a quilt.  Well, my brain finally woke up and remembered something.  Originally, I never intended a reading quilt for the library…I wanted to make it for the 2^nd or 3^rd grade class at Clinton School.  Then the teacher I was working with left….and after many tries over a couple years…no one from the school ever seemed interested in the quilts I was sending…or anything else….so I moved on.  With all of those embroideries, I guess I started then to think about a library quilt….and here we are several years later.  Maybe someday there will be one in our Del Webb library….who knows.  

My honey came home from golf with a score of 86 and one birdie, but he had also had heart flutters yet again, so he sacked out on the couch for about an hour until he felt better.  Cookie kept playing with her 'blankie' trying to entice him to get up (see videos at end).

By then it was 4 PM and we were both hungry, so we decided to start our date night a bit early.  We did puffy things:   

and saved our champagne: 

to go with popcorn and Mrs. Maisel.  We were celebrating the completion of the library quilt, surviving another week….and a serendipitous moment of ‘quelle horreur’ in the car :~).

Cookie saying 'dad!!!  get up and play with me!!!'