Inability to get tested or the inability of a Family Member or acquaintance of yours to get tested, its an understandable frustration. There are literally still Frontline Health care workers who have been seeing coronavirus patients in places like new york city who cant get themselves tested. Its just nuts. But today at a white house meeting with Oil Executives, the president blurted out, you know what . I like it. Lets test these guys. If anybody wants to be tested, well test them. And today at the white house, all those Oil Executives there to meet with the president got tested. Congratulations, gentlemen. Youre lucky guys. 305 people died of coronavirus in new york city in the past 24 hours, which means in americas largest city today, one person died from coronavirus every 4. 7 minutes. There are nearly 12,000 people hospitalized in new york city now, and we have been watching how that number has risen over the past two weeks. And how did people get to those hospitals . How do those patients arrive . Well, theres one particularly worrying new data point that we got from new york city today, which is that one in four ems officers in the new York Fire Department is out sick. And you know who ems officers are, right . I mean lets say you are ill with suspected coronavirus. Your condition has deteriorated such that you are in fear for your life. You call 911 for an ambulance. Well, the Fire Department dispatches emts, ems officers to come get you in an ambulance. One in four ems officers in the new york city Fire Department is out on sick leave, and this is not some kind of labor action or something. Theyre out because theyre ill. This is a 4,000officer force at fdny. 4,000 officers. About 1,000 of those 4,000 officers are out sick. We talk about Frontline Health workers and needing to keep them alive and on the job. Same thing for emts. Fdny, the new York Fire Department, also tonight mourning the death of one of its leaders. Deputy chief spechtor sayid ramen leaves behind his wife and their four sons. The governor of new york has been warning that new york is within a few days now of having every ventilator in the state in use, which will mean no more ventilators available to put new patients on, and that can be a death sentence. You dont go on to a ventilator early on in your disease progression. You go on to a ventilator as a lastditch effort to keep you alive. New yorks governor says it is a matter of days before new york has every ventilator in the state occupied. He has called for mutual aid from other states. If the federal government cant or wont coordinate the response, cant or wont coordinate the marshaling and allocation of resources nationwide, then the governor of new york says, please, could some other states provide equipment to new york now as new york approaches its apex patient load before any other state in the country does so. The governor of new york has repeatedly promised, including here on this show last night that if other states can bring equipment and personnel actually to new york now, he will personally ensure that new york will return the favor. New york will bring that equipment back and more when those other states approach their apex patient load in the weeks ahead. Today was another day when doctors and nurses at a new york city hospital, this time mt. Sinai, pulled together basically an ad hoc lowtech protest outside their facility to beg for protective equipment so they can keep treating patients without themselves getting infected. Today new york citys mayor, bill de blasio, sort of gamely tried to institute a National Draft for relief Health Care Workers for new york, asking for Health Care Workers to be called up from all over the country to come to new york, to help new york now, saying as the governor has been saying that new york will repay the favor back to other states, back to other cities in the country when they hit their peak if only new york can please get help now as they hit their peak first. Look, if another country were attacking the United States of america, if i told you that a country was attacking the United States of america, attacking our largest city and simultaneously attacking florida, attacking louisiana, attacking michigan, and that thousands of americans had died, and i said to you, do you think the military would be called up to fight that enemy . I know youd say yes. We cannot ask each city to try and somehow improvise while dealing with the greatest Health Care Crisis in a century. We cannot ask each state to just go it alone when the only possible way of getting through this is with the full support of our federal government, our military, and the medical community of our entire country. I have called for today something unprecedented, a national enlistment effort, a National Effort to bring all available medical personnel into the fight against the coronavirus. A national enlistment effort. The mayor of new york city. Of course, no mayor of any American City is empowered to institute a National Draft, right . No mayor can order the marshaling of a nationwide surge of American Power and personnel to help in a crisis, even if it is a crisis that threatens to kill thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of americans. Mayors arent in a position to be able to do that. The only person who can marshal that kind of national resources, well, the person at the head of the federal government. In the year 2000, the country elected barely and arguably george w. Bush to be president of the United States. In 2004, the country reelected george w. Bush to be president of the United States. You know how we got a charismatic young democrat who had only served a halfterm in the u. S. Senate and would be the nations first africanamerican president to be elected president in the United States of america in the election after those two . In part, we got barack obama elected in 2008 because of this having gone so wrong in the presidency of george w. Bush. Because in 2005, while a great American City drowned, this was president george w. Bush looking down on it from 30,000 feet. While the perspective on the ground at the time was one that would have led you to know that ultimately there would be nearly 2,000 americans dead. The george w. Bush white house was just absolutely feckless and failed in the face of that disaster. The president had hired a handpicked head of fema away from his previous job, which was that he was the judges and stewards commissioner for the International Arabian horse association. The day katrina hit, Michael Brown sent an email to another fema official that said, can i quit now . Can i come home . A few days into the disaster, he wrote to friends, quote, im trapped now. Please rescue me. The head of fema as 2,000 americans were dying. It was all hilarious. Mostly mr. Brown blamed everybody else. He liked in particular to blame the governor of the state of louisiana and the mayor of new orleans, saying amid a backdrop of 2,000 dead and dying americans, quote, if the mayor doesnt have the resources to get the poor, the elderly, the disabled, those who cannot out, or if he doesnt have the Police Capacity to enforce a mandatory evacuation to make people leave, then you end up with the kind of situation we have right now in new orleans. It turns out the mayor didnt seem to have the power to do what needed to be done, and so, yeah, what a terrible mayor. It must have been his fault. That was the hallmark of the disastrous failure of the george w. Bush administration in hurricane katrina. It wasnt the storm itself alone, right . It was the storm itself and a catastrophically failed federal response characterized by the federal government not doing it and wanting to blame state and local officials instead. Heres the headline in the Washington Post on september 4th, 2005. Almost a week into the full sprawl of that catastrophe. Many evacuated but thousands still waiting. Heres the lede in that piece. Quote, tens of thousands of people spent a fifth day awaiting evacuation from this ruined city. As Bush Administration officials blamed state and local authorities for what leaders at all levels have called a failure of the countrys Emergency Management. The federal response was was just feckless and counterproductive and unfocused. They didnt think it was their job. They were happy to blame lowerlevel officials. And so the federal government behaved accordingly. The secretary of state at the time this was all unfolding was literally highend shoe shopping in new york city has new orleans drowned. She ended up in the new york tabloids for getting cursed out by somebody working in the shoe shop. But the Bush Administration blaming local officials and the catastrophe of the federal response, those were not unrelated things, right . Blaming local officials was politically convenient. They particularly liked to blame democratic officials, for example, at the local and state level. But then failing to act, failing to do what the federal government was supposed to do, those were two sides of the same coin because what happened in the george w. Bush katrina failure was a specific National Technical kind of failure, right . When they sent in fema, even if it was being run by the Arabian Horse guy when they sent in fema, they invoked the National Emergencies act. These things arent a semantic way of just alerting people to the fact that something is a big problem. You dont call something a National Disaster or a National Emergency just to make it sound bad. Those are technocratic things, technocratic decisions that are supposed to set things in motion. When you declare something a National Disaster, a National Emergency, that is a means of declaring and setting in motion that the federal government will coordinate the response to the crisis. Its literally in the statute, right, that the president thereby putting the federal government in charge to, quote, coordinate all Disaster Relief assistance, provided by federal agencies, private organizations and state and local governments, to provide technical and advisory assistance to affected state and local governments and on and on. But it is the federal government that coordinates the response. That is what you are declaring you will do when you declare something a federal emergency, a federal disaster. Yes, local officials and state officials are in charge of their own problems in general on a day to day basis. But in cases where it is beyond their means to do so, then a disaster, an emergency is declared. And when that is declared at the federal level, as President Trump did for coronavirus on march 13th, that means something specific. It means the president has invoked the statutes that explicitly declare that the federal government will coordinate all Disaster Relief assistance. But then once you have declared that, you actually have to do it. In katrina, the Bush Administration ultimately did figure that out way too late, after they fired the Arabian Horse association guy. Heck a job and all the rest, right . Ultimately they brought in a u. S. Army general, general russel honore, who was just on with chris last hour. They brought him in to actually take charge and to start to clean up what had been a failed, feckless federal mess. But by the time general honore came in and started to get things in shape, for the 2,000 americans who died in that disaster, it was too late. And, no, that wasnt the only reason we got president obama as the successor to republican president George Walker bush. I mean george w. Bush was a bad president , and his presidency was full of very terrible things. But in katrina, that coarse and desperate technical failure to take federal responsibility for a National Disaster was just a different kind of bad. You know how people say, you had one job . Well, i mean, its a president s job to declare a National Disaster, a National Emergency. But then by definition, it is the president s job to get the federal government to run the response to that emergency. Thats why you declare it. Thats the whole point. If you are a president who has declared a National Emergency, you thereby accept National Responsibility to run the response to it. Thats your one job from that point forward, and its nobody elses job because nobody else has the power that you have to declare these things and put them in place and thereby put the federal government in charge of coordinating things. Thats it. When President Trump signed the National Emergency declaration for coronavirus on march 13th, he had been, you know, downplaying the severity of this. Hed been telling these weird tales about coronavirus, saying america would soon have zero cases and it would go away on its own, and it was all a hoax by the democrats designed to make him look bad. But dont Pay Attention to what he says. Watch what he does. I mean whatever he had said about it, nevertheless on that date, by declaring that federal emergency, he put the federal government in charge of the response, and then he didnt actually do the work. And so now we are in the part where he is blaming the states, right . His statement on twitter now that the states should have been stocked up and the Administration Today changing the definition of the federal stockpile of emergency supplies so that theyre making theyre making up now that its never supposed to be stuff that goes to the states to bolster what they need in a National Emergency even though thats always been what it is. I mean claiming the federal role here is just to play backup because its really the states that are responsible for responding to a National Disaster, and so therefore everything thats going wrong is the states fault. You know, its the same blame the governors, blame the mayor strategy that worked out so great for the george w. Bush white house during katrina. And as of today, the american death toll for coronavirus is more than triple already what the death toll was in katrina. It may be a hundred times the death toll from katrina by high summer. But the type of failure is the same at core. I mean and again, you know, if you get you can get really focused on the president s demeanor and the president s n mendaci mendacity. Yes, the president has lied about this crisis, lied about the virus. He has said terribly ignorant and dangerous and damaging things about it. His public presentations in how he has handled this are astonishingly bad. But ignore what he says. Look at what he has done. Still, no nationwide stayathome order. No widespread access to tests still. No national quartermastering for procurement and allocation of critical medical supplies. No real use of the defense production act to compel the production of supplies despite the fact that he keeps citing it. Its not happening. I mean to the contrary, hes actually been using fema to undercut the ability of states to procure materials on their own. Hes having fema bid against the states or claim states shipments of their own material that they have arranged to purchase on the open market while still telling states that its their responsibility to get all their own supplies and now saying that the federal stockpile is something for us, not the states. Yeah, heck of a job. But its also just the feckless nothingness of the response. The u. S. Epidemic is worse than every other epidemic on earth now, in part because our response was slow. Delay in this case equals death. Slowness equals death. This turns out to be crucial. If you act fast to contain the spread of the virus, you will reduce the number of people who ultimately get it, the number of people who get sick, and the number of people who die, and the rate at which your Health System is at risk of collapse. If we had had a national stayathome order when Northern California figured out that they better do that in the San Francisco bay area, if we had had federal Public Health leadership, federal National Disaster leadership that was as forwardthinking as the San Francisco bay area when they put in place their stayathome order, well, wed be in a place now where our president could be saying what the california governor is saying now, which is that the rate of infection might have been slowed enough in california that california might not end up having so many sick people at the same time that the hospitals get overwhelmed there. They might have successfull