Doing . I was just like i couldnt hear in my ear if shes good or not good. When i threw, i guess well see if were getting an empty shot. [ laughter ] i will tell i could tell you the backs of the dramatic back story as to why it took me an extra 22 seconds to get here today but it is best shared over a beer on the other side of the curve. I will tell you, my friend. Have a great weekend. All right. Thanks, chris. Much appreciate it. Thanks to you at home for joining us. Im super happy to have you here. Sorry i was 22 seconds late. Long story, ill tell you some day. I want to tell you about something behind the scenes at the Rachel Maddow show this week thats been interesting. Earlier this week, it happened over the course of a few days but by earlier this week we obtained a bunch of internal emails from a v. A. Medical center, specifically from the v. A. Medical center in minneapolis and what was interesting to us about those emails and eye thwhy they were provided to us they showed that the levels of ppe and other necessary supplies for the people that work at that facility, disinfectant wipes and Hand Sanitizer, it showed the level of those things in stock at the v. A. Facility. Show you what im talking about. Here is an email. This is from this past wednesday. And as you can see, the little graphic here in the email shows the current ppe status of each of these items. Face shields, 30day supply. Gloves, 30day supply. It also looks like theyre good in terms of masks needed for general use. 30day supply. But then look at this. Hand sanitizer, zero days of supply on hand. Oh. Same thing with Hydrogen Peroxide wipes. Bleach wipes, one day. Goggles or safety glasses, thats bad. Looks like a total of a fourday supply of those. This is an active v. A. Medical center serving loats of covid patients. Its pretty much the same in each i maemail we obtained. Very little Hand Sanitizer and disinfectant biwipes in stock. This varies whether youre looking for april or the beginning of this month or this week. On wednesday of this week, we tried to report on this story in so doing, we reached out to the department of Veterans Affairs for comment on the ppe supplies and a Public Affairs officer with the va responded just before we were due to go on the air with this. Quote, youre misinterpreting a routine email on supply levels. He added the v. A. Medical center in minneapolis is always stocked with Hand Sanitizer and has always been stocked with Hand Sanitizer. He said they have dispensers mounted throughout the facility. He also said employees have access to all the disinfecting products they need. Sort of a strong push back from the v. A. On that. That might have been the end of it had that not been for something that happened today because today we received yet another internal email. We received a copy of the new supply email thats being sent out to employees at the v. A. Medical center and this is different. As you can see, the old email used to break out the various disinfectant wipes they needed for working at that pa sfacilitt now as of today after that reporting on stuff being out of stock, now the email just says disinfectant wipes. Can we drop the bug to see that on the lower righthand corner of the screen . Can we drop that . Now they are lumping them all together. Thank you. Because of course, when you lump them all together and you just pick the one for which youve got 12 day supply situation, doesnt look that bad. As you can see, the email on wednesday also showed that that v. A. Medical center had zero days worth of Hand Sanitizer but as of today, they obtained a 20day supply, which is great. Good for them. Changing what you release in terms of information about how bad things are doesnt actually change how bad things are in real life. And it would be one thing if this was a one off from the v. A. Right . If they earned a reputation of giving it to us straight and this is them getting wooly in the one Va Medical Center in the one sore subject. The v. A has not been straight with the American People or employees at any point throughout this crisis. Here is another example. The department of Veterans Affairs is pushing to resume regular operations at the Medical Centers, expanding medical services and offering certain elective procedures and a shortage of necessary supplies for Health Workers at various v. A. Facilities around the country, v. A. Health care workers are demanding they should get hazard pay given the additional risk they are taking coming into work right now. The v. A. Says hazard pay is totally unwarranted. You might expect them to push back. They dont want to spend extra money on employees but look at the statement the departments press secretary put out about it. Look at this. Quote, hazard pay is to compensate employees when risks cannot be reasonably mitigated and employees cannot be safely protected. That is the opposite of the current environment at v. A. But dont ask us about those germicidal wipes. Well stop stepping ytelling yo have them anymore. It doesnt seem like the v. A. Is getting moneys worth in terms of the spokes people. Maybe they are. Maybe this is what they going for. Baghdad bobbing your way through this part of the crisis is something worse than embarrassing, right . The truth will ultimately learn what is going on and then all your happy talk about it will become at best embarrassing and at worst, indicting. Listen, i believe that v. A. Medical staff are doing their absolute best. If you meet someone that tells you they work at a v. A. Medical center, your instinct should be to buy that person a beer or shake their hand. They are doing a great Public Service by doing that work but the agenain itself and leadersh are not doing themselves favors by pretending everything is fine in the v. A. Right now. This is the largest Medical Center in the country. It serves vulnerable and valuable population of americans that everything issed theserved over 65. Its the federal governments direct responsibility. They need to get this right. Happy talk that the problems dont exist in the v. A. Is not a way to make the actual problems in the v. A. Go away. Its not a way to get help for those problems for sure. I mean, hello, v. A. Leadership, youre not alone having a hard time handling the challenges of the epidemic including keeping your medical staff protected with Hand Sanitizer and germicidal wipes and ppe. Youre not alone having those problems. It shouldnt be embarrassing to you that you are having these problems if you tell people the truth about what problems you are having, youll be a heck of a lot more likely to get help to meet the challenges. No one is looking to blame you. We want you to succeed when you lie, you make it hard to help you succeed. But we see this over and over again. This is becoming sort of a character test of various types of leadership and governance. Take the nebraska governor who finally made Headline National news this week when he finally hit the front page of the Washington Post for his remarkable decision to stop reporting coronavirus case numbers from individual meat packing plants in his state just as two big meat packing plants with significant outbreaks were starting to get test results from their workers. Thats when the governor decided we wont allow this data out anymore. We decided this data is privacy concern. Yeah, heaven forbid people actually know where the problem is. Right . Heaven forbid the workers and their families know that the communities know where these facilities are and workers go home at the end of the day, maybe if we dont talk about it it wont seem that bad. The problem is not information about the spread of the virus. The problem is the spread of the virus, which you cant stop if you dont have any information about where it is. But still, even so, this week that same governor, pete pic s ricketts said hell block the data coming out from certain Nursing Homes. This is on top of him deciding they will no longer release data about specific meat packing plants. No data about Nursing Homes released and the way around that if youre concerned is that he told nebraskae people they as individual citizens can call Nursing Homes one by one and ask if they have a coronavirus outbreak and how many cases and deaths they had. See what they say. Thats how were going to handle the spread of coronavirus in Nursing Homes in nebraska. Individual citizens just calling around and seeing what you can figure out. Is that going to help . Do you think thats going to make people think nebraska doesnt have people dying in Nursing Homes . We are far enough into this were seeing these kinds of dumb shoot the messenger distortions all over the place now. Various leaders in various states are figuring out when their epidemic is bad, people will be able to tell that because the numbers are bad and when the numbers are bad, that makes the graphs look bad so now we got all of this very artful dumb mat lying going on all over about both the numbers and the graphs. This was one of the best ones this week. This is a graph that the Georgia State government released ocn monday as brian kemp is trying to justify the radical rip the lid off end the stayathome orders approach to what is going on in georgia and his Approval Rating will be paying the price for it. Again, this is released by the State Government in georgia. You can see at the top there. This is the top five counties with the greatest number of confirmed covid19 cases in georgia. Top five worst hit counties in georgia and you can tell at a glance from looking at this, even if you dont put on your reading glasses, take a glance. You can tell this is good news, right . This is a good news chart about the worst hit counties in georgia. You can tell its good because everything goes down. Its all slumps and slopes generally off to the right until it disappears. The subhead explains the chart below represents the most impacted counties over the past 15 days and the number of cases over time. Like i said, i mean, that looks excellent, georgia. I can see why youre opening up with everything dropping to zero but put your readers on. Look at the bottom. Look at the x axis and what they have done here. Look left to right. It goes from april 28th to april 27th ahead to april 29th. Ahead to may 1st, back to april 30th. Jumps ahead to may 6th. Then back to may 4th. Then up to may 5th and back to april 25th. Then the 2nd of may and 7th of may, 8th of may. What the heck is this . Thats how you had to stack it to make it look like it was sloping down to the right . I mean, this is a graph that was specially created to create the impression of a pretty picture of things going down and Getting Better over time. When really no, theyre not. After the Georgia State government tried to pull this over on the people of the state of georgia g, one state legislator from atlanta wrote to the department of Public Health to say what the heck is this . He called it cuckoo they were trying to do this. This was sustained mockery and wonderment in georgia. You see this is from the Atlanta Journal constitution, their data interactive. This is the subject of much head scratching. They ultimately tried to make sense of it in the article that tends to follow a public official to the end of his or her career. Its just cuckoo. States latest mishap causes critics to cry foul. Here is the lead in that piece. This is [ laughter ] here is the latest. Where does sunday take place twice a week and where does may 2nd come before april 26th . Well, that happens in the state of georgia as it provides data on the covid19 pandemic. Quote, in the latest bungling of tracking data for the novel coronavirus, the Georgia Department of Public Healths website shows good news new confirmed cases in the county dropped every single day for the past two weeks. In fact, there was no clear downward trend. Cases held steady or dropped slightly in the past two weeks. Cases in the five worst hit counties were actually flat. Ultimately, after being ridiculed for it and questioned about it in ways they couldnt answer, the state changed the graph. The Kemp Administration apologized for having published that graph. The good news in that bad news story is that shame and rid kice and push back made them fix it. They are trying to justify the policy he wants which is to say everything is fine and nothing needs to be done to slow the spread anymore and thats his right to try to do that and to try to get away with that as governor, but at least because of the push back on what they tried to get away with this week, at least he now wont have what appears to be Public Health data backing up that b. S. Happy talk hes otherwise trying to get away with. Its one thing to blame the politician for making stuff up when the Public Health people appear to be on board, thats a much bigger problem. You can still get real data. Actually, real data prevented wh presented. The real data of whats happening in georgia is not good. I mean, here is georgia deaths from covid19 mapped by the Georgia Department of Public Health, thats bad. Thats particularly bad if youre opening up in the middle of that. Here is georgia confirmed cases from covid19. Very similar shape. Thats bad. Thats not what your state should look like if youre opening upright now. Here is georgia cumulative cases from covid over time thats the blue line. Thats bad. So yeah, if you want to look at graphs like that and say oh, trust me, everything is fine, dont believe your lying eyes, lets open up. If thats what you had if thats the real data in your state, you might want to fudge something that looks better than that which is apparently what they did but they got called on it and caught for it and ultimately took it down. Happy talk and hiding the data doesnt make the problem go away. Happily right now push back against b. S. Happy talk and hiding the data sometimes works to shame the people trying to do it and it makes them stop. Were seeing that at the National Level with investigative reporting by the associated prez ovss over the p two weeks. A. P. Reporting the white house shelving the cdcs guidelines how to safely reopen the country and pressuring the cdc not to release guidelines and not let anybody know they existed. It took a couple weeks of sustained attention and investigation by the a. P. And hard questions of people in the administration and leaks of the early drafts of the cdcs work being suppressed but last night finally some of it was finally actually issued by the cdc that wouldnt have happened without the ap investigating it and asking them hard questions about it. But that relationship, the survival and integrity of the cdc, the Publishing Health part of the u. S. Government that we ought to be able to look to enwheven when our politicians are getting it wrong, if that relationship between administration and cdc is being sort of tested now, just by the misfortune of us having an epidemic this bad while we have a government this terrible, this headline is the last thing you want to see in a country thats got the biggest epidemic on earth with 1. 4 million cases now in more than 88,000 americans already dead. This is not what you want to see as the lead headline in the Washington Post two months into this, growing friction between white house and cdc hobbles pandemic response. But that is whats going on. The post reporting tonight the Trump Administration inexplicably gave a 10 million no bid contract to a private company to collect a bunch of data about the epidemic that the cdc already collects. Well, why would you do that . Why would you undermine the c ddc that way . Maybe you want an alternate source of da to to trash the reputation and have data youre more comfortable with. Keep that in mind when the white house disputes the coronavirus death toll and saying not that Many Americans have actually died. Keep in mind they have bought and paid for a private source of data to compete with and undermine the cdcs data. The post reporting the cdc is so demoralized and kicked and beaten down, they are no longer trying to play their traditional role of keeping the public informed at the time of a Public Health crisis. The cdc that has not held a briefing repeatedly asked the white house to resume the sessions for the media according to two Senior Administration officials but not received permission and the cdc has finally given up. Also this, quote, now as trump promised a reignited economy heading into the november election, cdc is in the awkward possession of producing information trump wants least. The death rate plateaued at 2,000 americans dead every day. And if thats not enough of a test to see whether the Trump Administration will allow the cdc to do its work unimpeded, the cdc director robert rerd field says the track four different models of possible deaths. As of may 11th, all forecast an increase in deaths in the coming weeks and a cumulative total exceeding 100,000 american deaths by june 1st. June 1st is two weeks away. This is the cdc director saying tonight the best, the rosiest of the dozen forecasting models the cdc is tracking says there will be 100,000 americans dead by then by two weeks from now. And it gets worse from there. That the