Lost of goofy grins and some misty-eyed moments of joy: Anderson Cooper is already taking to this new dad thing pretty well.

That’s because at the end of CNN’s coronavirus global town hall on Thursday night, the anchor offered up a very heartfelt and personal bit of much-needed good news. He is now the proud father of a baby boy, born through a surrogate, named Wyatt Morgan Cooper.

“So, I just wanted to take a moment to share with you some joyful news of my own,” Cooper began. “On Monday, I became a father. I’ve never said that out loud and it astonishes me. I am a dad. I have a son, and I want you to meet him. This is Wyatt Cooper. He’s three days old.”

Cooper explained that his son is the namesake of his father, also named Wyatt, and that he chose the middle name, Morgan, because it is a family name on his mother’s side.

“So that’s Wyatt Morgan Cooper, my son. He was…” Cooper said, before trailing off briefly, overcome with emotion over what he had just said out loud. “He was…he was 7.2 pounds at birth, and he is sweet and soft and healthy, and I am beyond happy. As a gay kid, I never thought it would be possible to have a child, and I’m so grateful for all those who paved the way and for the doctors and nurses and everyone involved in my son’s birth. Most of all, I am eternally grateful to a remarkable surrogate who carried Wyatt, watched over him, and gave birth to him.”

“My surrogate has a beautiful family of her own, an amazingly supportive husband. I’m so thankful for the support she has given Wyatt and me,” Cooper said. “I do wish my mom and dad and brother were alive to meet Wyatt, but I like to think they can see him. I imagine them all together…” he said, his voice cracking, “their arms around each other smiling and laughing and watching, looking down on us. Happy that their love is alive in me and Wyatt and that our family continues. New life and new love.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

Tucker Carlson seemed to reveal big news on his Thursday night show when he pointed to a raft of recent studies that found young children cannot spread the coronavirus — but that groundbreaking claim was, in fact, not true, and was debunked on his show by Fox News medical correspondent Dr. Marc Siegel less than 60 seconds later.

The Fox News primetime host began his segment on the latest coronavirus news by saying: “And now to the latest science. There is new evidence that young children do not spread the coronavirus. Not what we thought.”

Mere moments later, Carlson introduced Siegel to expound on the study — and, ultimately, correct the record that Carlson had just botched.

“Tucker, I want to cut through the news and get to the science of this, which is that 78 studies out of the United Kingdom show that children, especially under the age of 10, are not very likely to get Covid-19 or to spread it,” Siegel said, leading off.

“But one of the authors of that study says he’s being a little bit misinterpreted and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has said that one to two percent of the cases, looking at 150,000 cases, were children under the age of 18,” Siegel continued. “The real truth here is, and a China study showed that 90 percent of children have asymptomatic cases, so Tucker, they appear to have a protein in the lungs that protects them from severe disease and almost all of the children who get this are either asymptomatic or have mild cases.”

The doctor then matter-of-factly — but unmistakably — fact-checked Carlson’s inaccurate take on the Covid-19 studies from just a minute before.

“But it is not true that children don’t get it and it is not true that they can’t spread it. Just much less likely than adults,” Siegel confirmed, which elicited a brief “hmm” from Carlson as Siegel moved on to discuss the massive nationwide campaign in pursuit of a coronavirus vaccine.

When Siegel finally finished, Carlson politely thanked him, but did not acknowledge the potential misinformation that the doctor had just prevented from spreading.  The Fox News host then segued into a fact-checking segment, where he acknowledged previous errors made on his Wednesday night program.

Watch above, via Fox News.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aired raw, smuggled-out footage of a recent prison riot in Lansing, Kansas, where inmates took control of a cell block to protest a lack of healthcare and three out of four prisoners have now tested positive for the coronavirus.

At the start of her Thursday night show, Maddow explained that she had obtained footage of the riot taken from inside the prison by one of the prisoners, but that after confirmation, felt confident in airing it.

What followed was a shaky, hand-held cell phone video showing disguised prisoners roaming freely around a cell block with no guards present. The narrator walks around showing trash and glass strewn everywhere, barricaded doors, and broken windows and then adds: “They ain’t giving us no healthcare for this coronavirus…They ain’t giving us no help for these motherfuckers. So we have to turn up real quick.”

“It’s a little hurly burly,” Maddow noted. “A video shot by a prisoner, inside Lansing state prison in Kansas. And obviously, what’s going on there is the kind of thing that you would call an uprising, or a riot, or an incident of unrest, depending on your perspective or maybe depending on your politics, but the prisoners there did really tear the place up.”

“As of that morning, the day they started tearing the place up, more than 14 members of the prison staff at Lansing had tested positive and had been sent home from work, 12 prisoners who had tested positive had been moved into a medical isolation unit,” she explained. “Now we have started to get the full, first full picture of what has really happened there, and the riot turns out to be just a crack in the window into this story. On Monday of this week, Lansing correctional facility reported that the first prisoner has died from coronavirus at that facility. Yesterday, Wednesday, the prison reported that a second prisoner had died from coronavirus at that facility.”

Prisoners had been housed up to four in a cell prior to the riot and guards were only wearing cotton masks. As of Wednesday, Maddow went on to add, 75 members of the prison staff have reportedly tested positive at Lansing. In addition, early test results found 75 percent of Lansing inmates now have the virus as well.

“So, when those prisoners in Kansas were rioting,” Maddow noted, “they were in fact, living in a unit where almost all of them would get infected with this disease, within just a couple of weeks. And now two of them thus far are dead.”

“We are far enough into this thing now, that we know where it is likely to be in large numbers. And we know for sure where it spreads the fastest, if we don’t take steps to stop it. We know that now,” an exasperated Maddow notes. “That said, it’s still hard to get tests in this country, even this far into it, even with nearly 63,000 Americans dead from this already, it is still hard to get testing here, but we do know now from watching the contours of this epidemic, from watching the number, watching those red dots on the epidemiological maps sprout all over the country and then zooming in and figuring out where those are, we know now where we ought to be testing, if we only had tests.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

Tucker Carlson laughed and sat helplessly as one of his Thursday night guests, a small business owner protesting Maine’s coronavirus lockdown, gave out the personal phone number of Maine’s governor on air and encouraged Fox News viewers to call her and complain.

Rick Savage, who owns a restaurant and brewery in Bethel, Maine, told Carlson that he plans on defying Democratic Governor Janet Mills’ order for certain small businesses to remain closed due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. He told the Fox News host that he pleaded with the governor to refund his state sales tax receipts from earlier in the year so his business could survive the lockdown decree. When Savage noted that the state had instead recently sent him a letter reminding him that March’s sales tax payments were due, Carlson went off.

“Ugh, come on!” Carlson exclaimed. “Janet Mills is the most incompetent, dictatorial, self-involved governor that I’ve seen in a long time.”

“Godspeed, Rick Savage,” the Fox host said moments later, as he started to wrap up the segment. But Savage quickly hijacked the show — and Carlson clearly played along.

“And one further thing, I would love to share Janet Mills’ cell phone number with everyone so they can give her a call directly,” Savage added, as a bemused grin began to form on Carlson’s face. “You can’t even call. It goes to voicemail. The lawmakers can’t even call. They have to email her,” Savage continued, his anger rising.

The incensed restaurateur then pulled out a pair of reading glasses and, glancing down, began to follow through on his promise: “Here’s her phone number. It’s 207…” At this, Carlson stumbled, laughed, held out his hand, but only put up feigned resistance as Savage bulled ahead and finished reading the number on air, his microphone and audio feed uninterrupted throughout it all.

“How about this?” Carlson said, after the fact.”If our viewers are interested, it’s Sunday River Brew Pub,” whereupon he suggested that his viewers call Savage to express support rather than calling the governor directly.

A document obtained by Mediaite shows that the cell phone number Savage made public on the show matches Mills’ phone number on a campaign finance form.

Watch above, via Fox News.

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Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon accused China of “premeditated murder” in an interview with host Eric Bolling on Sinclair’s United We Stand, basing his incendiary charge on the evidence that its government initially downplayed and concealed the threat of the human-to-human transmissibility of Covid-19 during December and January.

“They’re guilty of hiding this from people throughout the world, just like a biological Chernobyl,” Bannon claimed. “They’ve got to be held accountable.”

Bannon  also pointed out anonymously-sourced news reports that the coronavirus originated — in a mistaken safety breach — from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s top biological research lab. Asked on Thursday in a White House press conference, whether that theory merited consideration, Bannon’s former boss, President Donald Trump, said he had seen evidence to support “high confidence” in that explanation, but refused to go into detail when pressed by a reporter: “I cannot tell you that.” However, Trump did hint that the virus’s spread could’ve been an intentional act, when he said about controlling the outbreak that China “was either unable to or chose not to.”

China’s ruling Communist Party has refused to allow international researchers to visit the Wuhan lab, a fact Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted at a press briefing this week. “We still haven’t gained access, the world hasn’t gained access to the WIV, the virology institute there. We don’t know precisely where this virus originated from,” Pompeo said.

Bannon predicted a steep cost to China if other countries find it culpable of releasing the virus. “If it turns out it came out of a lab, and this was one of their experiments that got loose, and they have direct culpability in that regard, to me, that means they are not a legitimate government,” he said. “I think the reparations to the world are north of $5 trillion. I think it’s going to be $5 to $10 trillion paid over time, and that’s what we know today.”

Watch the video above, via Sinclair Broadcasting.

Fox News’ Laura Ingraham dismissed the criticism of Mike Pence now wearing a mask at the Mayo Clinic on her show Wednesday night.

She said during her Covid-19 commentary that “social control over large populations is achieved through fear and intimidation and suppression of free thought” and “conditioning the public through propaganda is also key, new dogmas replace good old common sense.”

Those statements were immediately followed up by a montage of people criticizing the vice president for not wearing a mask.

After a shot at CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Ingraham said, “They’ll say this whole mask thing is settled science just like they do with climate change. Of course, it’s not and they know it.”

“Our own experts have gone from ‘masks aren’t necessary’ to ‘masks are essential, you have to wear them when you go jogging’ in just a few weeks’ time,” she added.

Ingraham also swiped at Dr. Anthony Fauci for saying it’s inevitable there will be a second wave of the coronavirus, saying that too is not “settled science.”

You can watch above, via Fox News.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has created a public relations “vacuum” with his refusal to personally answer a former staffer’s allegation that he sexually assaulted her, according to New York writer Rebecca Traister. And, as a result, she noted that his prominent female political supporters are being forced to answer for the charges against him.

Traister joined MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday to discuss the latest news about the explosive claim by Tara Reade that Biden digitally penetrated her in assault when she was an aide to then-Senator Biden in 1993. Traister had just written a magazine essay on Monday called “The Biden Trap,” which criticized the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for expecting progressive women colleagues who have been strong advocates of the the #MeToo movement to confront — and defend — his behavior to the press.

“What this is creating is a kind of a perfect storm where the women who are being asked to support his opponent are now being asked to answer for these charges,” Traister pointed out. “In part because of the vacuum created by Joe Biden who is not yet really directly answering these questions, and certainly, not doing what I wish he would, which is to say: ‘Please direct your questions about these allegations to me, and not the women that are out there offering their support to my candidacy.'”

Hayes echoed Traister’s call for Biden to step forward and answer the allegations in person.

“The man in question, the nominee, the former vice president, is going to have to address them,” Hayes said, agreeing, “and not have Stacey Abrams or anyone else, or [Sen.] Kirsten Gillibrand do that. Rebecca Traister, your piece was fantastic and thank you for making time tonight.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.

CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said Wednesday night that President Donald Trump is just unable to show empathy during the coronavirus crisis and he’s too worried about himself.

Erin Burnett talked about the president’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and reporting about the politics behind the scenes.

Brinkley said, “I think Trump’s unraveling before our very eyes when he does these conferences, he seems to have a empathy deficit disorder. I’ve never seen a president unable to speak like a human being to people on the front lines to talk and tell the stories about doctors and nurses, medical experts and what they’re really trying to do. He constantly is putting the whole story on himself and you can’t trust what he says.”

He brought up drop Trump “sinking in the polls” and said, “A lot of it is because he doesn’t seem to have an open heart. What he’s worried about is himself and I can see why he blows up… [over] having bad polls.”

David Gregory added that Trump detracts from the serious issues Americans are worried about “when he talks about disinfectants, when he talks about what a great job he’s doing, when he goes after reporters.”

You can watch above, via CNN.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, we reported onreported on Elon Musk’s tweets calling for America to be reopened despite continued concerns about the coronavirus. He tweeted “FREE AMERICA NOW” and said people are under “de facto house arrest.”

Musk was criticized for his tweets and a fair number of people brought up his March 19h tweethis March 19h tweet saying, “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.”

Apparently Musk was so fired up after his tweets last night that he went on a fiery rant during Tesla’s earnings call. Per The Verge:

“The expansion of shelter-in-place, or as we call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights, is, in my opinion, breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America and built this country,” Musk said. “What the fuck!”

“If somebody wants to stay in the house that’s great,” Musk continued. “They should be allowed to stay in the house and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do… this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.”

Tonight in response to a tweet about his rant, Musk tweeted, “Hell yeah!!”

Hell yeah!!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2020

Bon voyage

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2020

Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice ridiculed White House advisor and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for his bizarre victory lap on Fox & Friends where he boasted of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic even as the national death toll passed the 60,000 mark.

Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Rice offered a derisive, scathing review of Kushner’s sunny self-assessment.

“It’s ridiculous,” Rice said. “And it would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious. I don’t know how anybody with a straight face can call this a great success and declare this a mission accomplished moment when more than 60,000 Americans are dead, when more than a million are infected.”

Surpassing the 60,000 death toll on Wednesday was a particularly grim milestone, as a revised IMHE projection from last month estimated that number would be the final fatality total in August. But as the spread and death curve has flattened, it has also stubbornly plateaued. And the presidential son-in-law’s Pollyanna-like take was even more stunning since Trump himself was predicting just two months ago that the number of overall Covid-19 cases, which has now topped one million, would quickly fall from 15 to zero.

“This is the beginning, not the end of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States,” Rice added. “Dr. Fauci’s judgment, whose judgement I trust implicitly, has just said he believes a second wave in the fall is inevitable, and that’s the pattern of pandemics of the past. So we are far from being able to declare victory. In any event, there’s no victory when the losses on the battlefield in less than two months exceed all of those through the entirety of the Vietnam War, 26 plus million Americans are out of work, the GDP is declining at a rate of almost five percent. That number’s going to go way down. Our economy is suffering extraordinarily, and human beings most importantly are dying and suffering and losing.”

“So we need to come together, Wolf, with a realistic assessment of where we are,” Rice added. “This is not the time for politics. This is not the time for victory laps. This is time to buckle up and realize that we’re at an inflection point. We’re either going to continue to take the steps that are necessary to keep Americans safe, or we’re going to prematurely declare victory, open everything before circumstances warrant, and we’re going to be right back in the barrel in a worse situation in the months to come.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Jonathan Reiner was neither impressed nor amused by Vice President Mike Pence’s medical decision making on Tuesday.

After the vice president openly flouted the Mayo Clinic’s own guidelines about mandatory mask usage during a visit to the healthcare facility, Reiner, a cardiologist and former Bush White House medial advisor slammed the move on CNN as “so wrong, so tone deaf.”

Speaking with Erin Burnett, Reiner pulled no punches in his take on Pence, who tried to defend his decision to violate the Mayo Clinic’s mask rule by saying he has tested negative for the coronavirus multiple times and that he wanted to thank the healthcare workers and “look them in the eye” — which is, notably, still possible while wearing a surgical-type mask.

“Wow. So wrong, so tone deaf,” Reiner fired back, when Burnett asked the doctor about his reaction. “Look, first of all, on one level this is just another in a series of mixed messages that we have gotten from the White House about this crisis. We tell the public that we want you to wear mask when you go out in public and now the vice president shows up at a hospital and refuses to wear a mask.”

“We saw today that Jet Blue is going to require all passengers to wear mask,” Reiner added, “but yet the Vice President of the United States goes to a hospital and doesn’t wear a mask.”

“I was in late last night for an emergency procedure and early this morning,” the doctor continued. “Every second in the hospital, I wore a mask. Most of the time when I wasn’t in the presence of a patient and I wore the mask and we wear the mask every time we’re in the hospital, all the time we’re in the hospital to protect our colleagues. When we tell a patient — when we tell the community to wear a mask, we’re telling them to protect their neighbors, the old lady that lives next door, the man down the street. You wear mask to protect the community.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

Congressman Justin Amash, the former Republican turned Independent, has announced the formation of a presidential exploratory committee for the Libertarian Party 2020 nomination.

Amash made the announcement on Twitter Tuesday night, saying, “We’re ready for a presidency that will restore respect for our Constitution and bring people together. I’m excited and honored to be taking these first steps toward serving Americans of every background as president.”

We’re ready for a presidency that will restore respect for our Constitution and bring people together. I’m excited and honored to be taking these first steps toward serving Americans of every background as president.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) April 29, 2020

There had been speculation for months that Amash might mount a third-party run, and earlier this month he tweeted, “Trump versus Biden is not the contest America deserves or the one it needs right now.”

Trump versus Biden is not the contest America deserves or the one it needs right now.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) April 8, 2020

You’ll recall that Amash set off a firestorm last May when he said, while he was still a Republican, that Trump engaged in impeachable conduct. He eventually left the GOP and voted in favor of impeachment back in December.

PragerU received a fair amount of Twitter mockery on Tuesday for this tweet on the coronavirus lockdowns:

It's time to call it what it is.#COVID19 pic.twitter.com/hLXIkzNJ0R

— PragerU (@prageru) April 28, 2020

“The lockdown is the greatest mistake in the history of humanity.”

Dennis Prager raised the question of whether the lockdowns have been effective, partly citing the serious ongoing economic concerns, in a recent PragerU video.

The tweet tonight received a lot of mockery:

Never mind the burning of the library at Alexandria, European colonialism, the 1914 alliances that provoked the Great War, the Weimar left and center failing to unite against Hitler and the Orioles trading Schilling, Harnish and Finley for Glenn Davis, https://t.co/CRtIjXzrt8

— David Simon (@AoDespair) April 28, 2020

bottle up the confidence it takes to put this take on a graphic and use it to propel your life https://t.co/NZ0QOnNWgQ

— Steadman (@AsteadWesley) April 28, 2020

(stares in historian) https://t.co/NPLP0s2O95

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) April 28, 2020

https://t.co/4dKmlJuJyf

— Siraj Hashmi (@SirajAHashmi) April 28, 2020

No, no it’s not https://t.co/tXJRq7dynA

— Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) April 28, 2020

Let’s assume it’s a mistake. The biggest in human history? The reparations on Germany after WWI? Sending Lenin back to Russia? Carve out for slavery in the US Constitution? The Fire of Alexandria? Canceling Firefly? https://t.co/qGxbu0tUBu

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) April 28, 2020

imagine having this take when season 8 of game of thrones exists https://t.co/EMo1lmiQJA

— Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) April 28, 2020

I worked for the same conservative media co. @DennisPrager works for. Prager is no dummy. He can’t believe this. But this is what sucks about conservative media. You get rewarded for being outlandish, for enraging your audience. I did it at times too. It’s wrong. It’s dishonest. https://t.co/K2DBC9pOqj

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) April 28, 2020

pic.twitter.com/jACG2BuiYj

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) April 28, 2020

Galaxy Brain stuff from the University of Prager. https://t.co/YqSqeCNCG9

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) April 28, 2020

pic.twitter.com/pDVb9lTGRl

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) April 28, 2020