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A pair of GOP lawmakers urged Twitter to ban scores of Chinese government accounts that attempt to "spread propaganda and whitewash" evidence suggesting China downplayed and covered-up early indications of the coronavirus's impact.

Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsinin a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stressed that the Chinese government was using the platform to "disseminate propaganda" amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Both pointed to the Communist Party of China's (CCP) obfuscation over the origins of the coronavirus in recent weeks, when Chinese senior officials alleged without evidence that the US Army "brought" the virus to their country.

"We believe this behavior more than warrants their removal from the platform," the Sasse and Gallagher said in the letter. "Additionally, given the humanitarian importance of free and open access to the internet, we believe that access to social media platforms should be denied to government officials from countries that prohibit their own populations from accessing this very content."

Similar to other authoritarian countries like Iran, Twitter is officially blocked in China. In 2019, Twitter removed nearly 4,800 accounts, over 1,600 of which sent out 2 million tweets that frequently shared news content "with an angle that benefited the diplomatic and geostrategic views of the Iranian state."

Chinese President Xi Jingping and President Donald Trump. Getty Images / Thomas Peter-Pool

Despite the official ban, state-influenced media organizations like Xinhua, as well as Chinese government officials, have accounts on the social media platform.

"When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian tweeted on March 12. "Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation."

The novel coronavirus is widely believed to have originated from wild animals, with early cases in December indicating it may have spread from a wildlife market in Wuhan, China.

"While the coronavirus pandemic is afflicting families, governments, and markets around the world, the Chinese Communist Party is waging a massive propaganda campaign to rewrite the history of COVID-19 and whitewash the Party's lies to the Chinese people and the world," the Republicans said.

The Republican letter comes days after a party colleague, Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, was blocked on Twitter by Zhao. Neither Banks nor Zhao previously tweeted to each other; however, the Republican has been critical of the CCP for targeting "politicians that are generally critical of China," the lawmaker previously said to Insider.

Some Republican lawmakers and personalities have also suggested that the Chinese government could have manufactured the disease. Republicans like longtime China-hawk Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas pointed to the proximity of the Wuhan wildlife markets to a Chinese "superlaboratory" and questioned whether the coronavirus may have been developed there.

Cotton has yet to provide evidence of the suggestion, but referenced the Chinese government's indisputable sequence of suppressing information and downplaying the outbreak in its early stages, and alleged it was "lying about it from the very beginning."

Chinese officials have been accused of lowering the number of positive cases and tamping down on reports since December, prior to when the virus's spread was formally acknowledged by the government. The lack of transparency and action has been scrutinized in the US, where lawmakers claim that the information may have allowed the country to better prepare for the pandemic.

The hawkish sentiment towards the CCP comes as the White House is pushing talking points that accuse Beijing of a "cover-up," according to a US State Department cable and two officials cited in a Daily Beast report.

"The [CCP] is waging a propaganda campaign to desperately try to shift responsibility for the global pandemic to the United States. This effort is futile," the cable said, according to The Daily Beast. "Thanks to the cover-up, Chinese and international experts missed a critical window to contain the outbreak within China and stop its global spread. Saving lives is more important than saving face."

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Republicans call for Twitter ban against the Chinese government - Business Insider - Business Insider

President Donald Trump was criticized by a top former official in his administration over his plans to re-open the economy.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laid out his arguments in a Twitter thread.

"Theres a strong and understandable desire to return to better times and a functioning economy. But it should not be lost on anyone that there's no such thing as a functioning economy and society so long as COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrolled in our biggest cities," Gottlieb wrote.

"So long as COVID-19 spreads uncontrolled, older people will die in historic numbers, middle aged folks doomed to prolonged ICU stays to fight for their lives, hospitals will be overwhelmed, and most Americans terrified to leave homes, eat out, take the subway, or go to the park," he continued.

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Failure of the worst kind: Republican blasts Trump for forcing states to compete with each other to obtain protective gear - Raw Story

President Donald Trump was criticized by a top former official in his administration over his plans to re-open the economy.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) laid out his arguments in a Twitter thread.

"Theres a strong and understandable desire to return to better times and a functioning economy. But it should not be lost on anyone that there's no such thing as a functioning economy and society so long as COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrolled in our biggest cities," Gottlieb wrote.

"So long as COVID-19 spreads uncontrolled, older people will die in historic numbers, middle aged folks doomed to prolonged ICU stays to fight for their lives, hospitals will be overwhelmed, and most Americans terrified to leave homes, eat out, take the subway, or go to the park," he continued.

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Republican calls for a State Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer to repent for sins that brought on coronavirus - Raw Story

One of the critiques that is often leveled at the NeverTrumpers is that, even as they reject the current presidents words and deeds, they fail to assume any responsibility for how we got here. That isnt true of Stuart Stevens, who once served as Mitt Romneys campaign strategist. Hehas writtena courageous piece titled, Republicans like me built this moment. Then we looked the other way.

The failures of the governments response to thecoronavirus crisiscan be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few:Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

As the country deals with the fallout of this administrations failure to respond to a pandemic, it is important to remember that it didnt all start with Donald Trump.

During his 1981 inaugural address, the patron saint of the Republican PartyRonald Reaganfamously said that Government is not the solution to our problem, governmentisthe problem. He was articulating a foundational principle of the modern-day GOP, which sees government as the enemy of free-market capitalism.

Leading up to Reagans election, Republicans used the so-called Southern Strategy to win over support from the majority of white Americans for their efforts to dismantle the federal government. Harkening back to the Civil War, they did so under the banner of state rights, and by claiming that federal government initiatives were designed to help those people.

During the Reagan era, a strategy to starve the beastwas incorporated, which promoted tax cuts as a way to reduce federal revenue. One of the main proponents of that strategy was Grover Norquist, who famously said, I dont want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

Fast forward to 2016 and we have Donald Trump running for president on a promise to drain the swamp. As we now know, that wasnt an allusion to ending corruption. While serving as White House chief strategist, Steve Bannonexplainedthat the goal was the deconstruction of the administrative state. Through a combination of incompetence and malevolence, they have been wildly successful in those efforts.

Because most of the programs and regulations administered by the federal government are supported by the majority of Americans, advocating for their dissolution has always required subterfuge. That is why one of the fallbacks has always been to employ racism. But when it came time to starve the beast, Republicans invented the lie of trickle-down economics, suggesting that tax breaks to the wealthy would somehow trickle down to the rest of us.

All of that meant that, as David Robertswrote, Republicans became the post-truth party.

Republicans thus talk about taxes and spending and regulation in the abstract, since Americans oppose them in the abstract even as they support their specific manifestations. They talk about cutting the deficit even as they slash taxes on the rich and launch unfunded wars. They talk about free markets even as they subsidize fossil fuels. They talk about American exceptionalism even as they protect fossil-fuel incumbents and fight research and infrastructure investments.

In short, Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. Theyve realized that their rhetoric doesnt have to bear any connection to their policy agenda. They can go through different slogans, different rationales, different fights, depending on the political landscape of the moment. They need not feel bound by previous slogans, rationales, or fights. Theyve realized that policy is policy and politics is politics and they can push for the former while waging the latter battle on its own terms. The two have become entirely unmoored.

In order to sell those lies, Republicans had to reject things like facts, science, and math. Experts on those matters were labeled elitists (most often relegated to liberal coastal states) who were attempting to silence the heartland. That became a rallying cry of the so-called populists during the 2016 election. This cartoon captures what it means to reject elitists who happen to be the experts.

That attitude helps explain how we wound up with a man in the White House whose major claim to fame had previously been to star in a reality television series.

As the saying goes, Im old enough to remember that Republicans howled when, during a 2004 debate, John Kerrysuggestedthat a presidents decision to go to war should pass a global test of legitimacy. Four years later, they accused President Obama of leading from behind when he attempted to partner with our allies. Those were the harbingers to Trumps isolationism captured by his America First mentality.

A Republican president is now presiding over the federal governments response to a pandemic. He is doing so with a bureaucracy that has been decimated, while he lies, rejects the advice of experts, and assumes that a virus can be stopped by building walls. Stevens sums it up by writing, What is happening now is the inevitable result of a party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia, and regarded facts as dangerous, left-wing landmines that must be avoided.

Of course, the first order of business for all of us is to get through this pandemic as best we can. But we should never forget that it wasnt just Trump that failed in his response. He is heir to decades of Republican principles that paved the way for needless suffering on a massive scale.

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A Republican admits that the toxic fantasies of his party have led us to an unprecedented crisis - AlterNet

Asked if he would extend current guidelines on social distancing if it was recommended by public health experts, Trump said: "If it were up to the doctors, theyd say lets keep it shut down, lets shut down the entire world ... We cant do that."

Trump launched the federal government's "15 days to slow the spread" campaign last week, advising Americans to limit social gatherings to 10 people, work from home and avoid discretionary travel.

In a late-night Twitter stream, he retweeted several posts advocating letting the guidelines lapse at the end of the 15-day period.

"The fear of the virus cannot collapse our economy that President Trump has built up," one of Trump's retweeted posts said. "The People are smart enough to keep away from others if we know that we are sick or they are sick! After 15 days are over the world can begin to heal!"

Trump also retweeted a post saying "Flatten the curve NOT the Economy" and another saying: "15 days, then we keep the high risk groups protected as necessary and the rest of us go back to work."

In an appearance on Fox News, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, 69, said: "No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance for your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?

"And if thats the exchange, Im all in."

Patrick, who is essentially the state's vice-governor, continued: "I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country like me - I have six grandchildren - that, what we all care about, and what we love more than anything are those children. And I want to live smart and see through this but I dont want the whole country to be sacrificed."

Speaking on Fox News White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said: "The President is right. The cure can't be worse than the disease. And we're going to have to make some difficult trade-offs."

The toughest measures to prevent the spread of the virus - such as stay-at-home orders and closures of non-essential businesses - have all been taken by state governors and mayors, rather than the federal government.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.Credit:AP

But if the Trump administration were to soften or remove its guidelines, it could embolden Republican-controlled states to avoid taking action and discourage conservative Americans from practising social distancing.

Confirmed coronavirus cases continue to rise in the US as testing becomes more widely available. At least 500 people have died from the illness and over 43,000 people have tested positive.

Democrats and Republicans have still not been able to agree on the final form of a massive economic rescue package that remains stuck in the Senate. On Monday afternoon (Tuesday AEDT) Democrats again voted to block the bill from proceeding to a vote.

Democrats particularly oppose what they are calling a $US500 billion ($845 billion) "slush fund" that would be under control of the US Treasury Secretary.

Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer said he was "very close" to reaching a deal with the Trump administration on what would be the "largest emergency funding bill in American history".

"Our goal is to reach a deal today," he said.

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Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell slammed his Democratic Senate colleagues.

"They out to be embarrassed," he said.

"This is not a juicy political opportunity, this is a national emergency... The country doesn't have time for these political games."

The cost of the Senate bill is currently $US1.6 trillion and that amount is likely to grow even larger as negotiations continue.

Matthew Knott is North America correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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Republicans say the virus fight may cost the economy too much - Sydney Morning Herald