text:
An Unprecedented Disaster
Can we agree yet that America under Trump is an unprecedented disaster? The guy has no interest in running the government, and in fact at this point it is appearing that he is destroying the country intentionally. You couldn't accidentally do this badly.
The president dismantled the pandemic team a couple of years ago and cut the budget to the CDC. When the pandemic came to the US he said "It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," and he went off to play golf and hold campaign rallies.
As the epidemic exploded into chaos, Trump claimed he is "not responsible at all" and told the states to figure out where to get their own supplies, while the federal government confiscated medical supplies that the states had ordered.
He put Jared Kushner in charge.
Hospitals are cutting their employees, reducing pay, nurses are wearing garbage bags for protection. Doctors and nurses make up a significant proportion of the cases, including deaths, because they are working without protective equipment that the government used to stockpile, but somehow the stockpile was not maintained and now the stockpile is almost depleted.
We have no idea how many Americans have the disease, who is most vulnerable, how it is spreading, where it is subsiding, because we are not conducting enough tests. The federal government had announced it is not funding any tests after today, though as of yesterday they say they will help sites that ask for it. Typically, nobody knows what is going on.
Why would they even consider that? Testing is the only way for us to get knowledge about the epidemic, so we can plan a rational strategy to deal with it. The United States has no strategy. We have people avoiding one another and Republicans worrying about the economy, urging us to get back to work and stop hiding under the bed.
The president has expressed no concern or sympathy for any of the tens of thousands dead from the disease, but he is concerned about the stock market and his Facebook and television ratings. He is in a big hurry to get people back out in public to be exposed to the virus even more. He wants to save the cruise industry and the hotels.
It is time to ask the question: why is he doing this?
The thing is, there are so many possible explanations that there is no best theory. Personal, financial, political... This is an unprecedented attack on American society and it is succeeding. When Trump came into office his spokesperson said they intended to "deconstruct the administrative state," and indeed he appointed comically unqualified people, fired the competent ones, and ran the whole government like a three-year-old in a mud puddle. Now thousands are dead and the economy is a shambles. Since the start of the pandemic he has replaced or fired key people, he has eliminated all regulations to protect the environment, arranged government bailouts that will go to his own companies, fired two inspectors general who would oversee his corruption, reorganized his office for the umpteenth time, I don't need to go on, you can read the news same as me. It is an unprecedented attack on America. We have literally never seen anything like this before.
Americans are staying in, practicing "social distancing" very well, and the virus' spread has been slowed in many places. But the United States did literally nothing at all, as a unified country, for critical months while this thing built up. The intelligence community was aware of the epidemic in Wuhan and began briefing high-level White House staff last November, and they did nothing until the middle of March. Didn't buy supplies, didn't plan, didn't alert the public or the medical community: nothing.
Could this be mere incompetence? It really doesn't seem possible. Look at the Republican Senators who sold their stocks in anticipation of the pandemic, but did not warn citizens about it -- they are all in on this. Even a bungler would appear to feel sorry when thousands of people were dying, but Trump acts like these are characters on a TV show. Why is the federal government intercepting supplies headed to states who ordered them? That isn't incompetence, that is intentionally interfering, making it harder for Americans to fight the disease. It can't be simple incompetence.
[Update: CNN: Federal support to end for coronavirus testing sites
He changed his mind again.]
posted by JimK at 11:13 AM
HOW DARE YOU?!?
Dare Angel said...
Singapore, a crowded city of 5.7 million people, has had a resurgence of the epidemic. They are now up to six deaths. The US is above 17,000 dead.
To be more comparable, New York City, with 8.6 million residents, has more than 7,000 dead.
Somebody managed the pandemic, and somebody didn't.
Rainbow said...
"HOW DARE YOU?!?"
Oh look. It's a great and powerful Oz wanna-be.
Kinda like our NY thug president.
Trump is most certainly an unprecedented disaster. One that gets worse every day. Pray for the survival of the American democracy.
Dire shortages of vital medical equipment in the Strategic National Stockpile that are now hampering the coronavirus response trace back to the budget wars of the Obama years, when congressional Republicans elected on the Tea Party wave forced the White House to accept sweeping cuts to federal spending.
How The Republican Party Left the National Emergency Medical Stockpile Unprepared for Coronavirus
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "did you know George W created a stockpile of 100 million respirator masks after the anthrax scare? did you know Obama used them all up during the swine flu outbreak? and then used the money allotted to replace them on something else?"
Once again, the truth is the exact opposite of what Wyatt/Regina said it is. As explained in the article above, Obama did use the masks during the swine flue outbreak, but he did try to replace them and was blocked by the Republican congress.
So, yet again, it was Republicans at fault and Wyatt and Regina lie and blame it on Obama:
"After using up the swine flu emergency funds, the Obama administration tried to replenish the stockpile in 2011 by asking Congress to provide $655 million, up from the previous year's budget of less than $600 million. Responding to swine flu, which the CDC estimated killed more than 12,000 people in the United States over the course of a year, had required the largest deployment in the stockpile's history, including nearly 20 million pieces of personal protective equipment and more than 85 million N95 masks, according to a 2016 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
"We recognized the need for replenishment of the stockpile and budgeted about a 10% increase," said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama administration. "That was rejected by the Republican House.""
Aalto University, the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), Technical and Innovation Centre VTT and Helsinki University said...
A 3D model of a person coughing in an indoor environment – how an aerosol cloud travels in the air
up in Canada, they have a sad sack of trash lying in the street, and on the computer said...
"Singapore, a crowded city of 5.7 million people, has had a resurgence of the epidemic. They are now up to six deaths. The US is above 17,000 dead."
there's something about authoritarianism for people like TTFers
in Singapore, if you litter, they flog you in the street
it's very cleans
they probably shoot anyone who catches COVID
that'll keep it from spreading
I guess we should take that guy from Singapore and put him in charge of Italy and Spain and Britain
"Can we agree yet that America under Trump is an unprecedented disaster?"
can we agree how much worse it would be if Hillary were President?
she'd be saying the pandemic was a vast right-wing conspiracy and pour a glass of chardonnay
actually, that's what TTF says
in any case, we'd have hundreds of thousands dead with Hillary Milhaus Von Pantsuit "in charge"
but, in fairness, Bill would start maintaining six feet of separation from the interns in the West Wing
"The guy has no interest in running the government, and in fact at this point it is appearing that he is destroying the country intentionally."
seems to be doing as well as could be expected
this is an unprovoked attack by the Orwellians in Beijing
he's working on the health of the nation first
then, we'll deal with the X-man
"The president dismantled the pandemic team a couple of years ago"
he has a great team appear with him on TV every night
"and cut the budget to the CDC."
they don't need more money
they need more competence
"When the pandemic came to the US he said "It's going to disappear. One day it's like a miracle, it will disappear," and he went off to play golf and hold campaign rallies."
he immediately took steps to ban visitors from the hot spot
"As the epidemic exploded into chaos, Trump claimed he is "not responsible at all" and told the states to figure out where to get their own supplies, while the federal government confiscated medical supplies that the states had ordered."
all the states have had the supplies when they need them
"He put Jared Kushner in charge."
remember when Bill put Hillary in charge of health care?
people are still laughing decades later
"Hospitals are cutting their employees, reducing pay,"
really? why?
"nurses are wearing garbage bags for protection."
they did for about a week when the media caused a panic and supplies were wiped out
"Doctors and nurses make up a significant proportion of the cases, including deaths, because they are working without protective equipment that the government used to stockpile,"
they always "make up a significant proportion of the cases"
it's not because they lack protective equipment
"but somehow the stockpile was not maintained and now the stockpile is almost depleted."
Obama's gone
stop whining about him
"We have no idea how many Americans have the disease, who is most vulnerable, how it is spreading, where it is subsiding, because we are not conducting enough tests."
no, it's because it's a new disease and China lied about it and too many people believed them
"The federal government had announced it is not funding any tests after today, though as of yesterday they say they will help sites that ask for it. Typically, nobody knows what is going on."
there is no lack of funding for tests
"Why would they even consider that? Testing is the only way for us to get knowledge about the epidemic, so we can plan a rational strategy to deal with it."
we have top people on it
people who do the math AND use their brain
rather than TTF-types
who do the meth AND abuse their brain
"The United States has no strategy. We have people avoiding one another and Republicans worrying about the economy, urging us to get back to work and stop hiding under the bed."
we're using the same strategy everyone is
it's working
"The president has expressed no concern or sympathy for any of the tens of thousands dead from the disease,"
I've heard him express some
of course, it's not natural for him
"but he is concerned about the stock market and his Facebook and television ratings."
as opposed to the media?
"He is in a big hurry to get people back out in public to be exposed to the virus even more. He wants to save the cruise industry and the hotels.
It is time to ask the question: why is he doing this?"
he knows the whole thing is big over-reaction and the economic effects are worse than the disease
"The thing is, there are so many possible explanations that there is no best theory. Personal, financial, political..."
sounds like a list of explanations for Trump Derangement Syndrome
"This is an unprecedented attack on American society and it is succeeding."
China must be stopped
"When Trump came into office his spokesperson said they intended to "deconstruct the administrative state," and indeed he appointed comically unqualified people, fired the competent ones,"
yes, anyone who can't see that socialism is the only path
is just unqualified
"and ran the whole government like a three-year-old in a mud puddle."
Obama again
"Now thousands are dead and the economy is a shambles."
that pretty much describes the world
is Trump running the whole wide world?
"Since the start of the pandemic he has replaced or fired key people, he has eliminated all regulations to protect the environment, arranged government bailouts that will go to his own companies, fired two inspectors general who would oversee his corruption, reorganized his office for the umpteenth time, I don't need to go on,"
you'll need to if you want to make any point relevant to the pandemic
"you can read the news same as me."
not with the same bias and preconceived notions and careful selection of media that wil reinforce it
"It is an unprecedented attack on America. We have literally never seen anything like this before."
TTF's MO is nothing to brag about
"Americans are staying in, practicing "social distancing" very well, and the virus' spread has been slowed in many places. But the United States did literally nothing at all, as a unified country,"
how revealing that you think Americans and the United States are two different things
When you argue with a 3 year old said...
Troll,
You could save yourself a lot of typing by just saying "Nuh-uh!" after everything you paste.
Jeff Tiedrich said...
Every day more than a thousand Americans die in agony, gasping for air as they drown in their own infected fluids, but please do remember the real victim in all this is the imbecile narcissist who isn't getting enough praise in the press.
Merrick Garland ... LOL said...
no, Jackass Jeff, the real victims are those who voted for Dems who are more obsessed with attacking the President than fighting the pandemic
Trump has warning Americans about China and its influence over international organizations for years
World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is increasingly being held to account for his organization's stumbles at the outset of the coronavirus epidemic as critics around the world hone in on his collusion with China's dishonesty about the outbreak.
"This DG has made his position pretty clear and his alliances pretty clear," Taiwanese diplomat Vincent Chao said Thursday.
Chao, a senior official in Taiwan's de facto embassy to the United States, made that jab while discussing the expectation that Tedros will fight Taiwan's bid to participate in the World Health Assembly in 2020. China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and opposes any recognition of the island as a separate nation.
"Geneva was, like, vegetative," an Asian official said of the WHO's "disappointing" response to the emergence of the dangerous new virus in China. "There are many criticisms of WHO's incompetence during the COVID situation."
That's true even among European governments inclined to work closely with Tedros. "When you get away from the official positions and you're talking about informal perceptions, there is an informal perception that the WHO covered up for China," Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO and special envoy for Ukraine, said. "There is a perception that's pretty widespread."
The controversy over the WHO's response springs in part from the tension between China and Taiwan, the island where the government overthrown during the Chinese Communist Revolution have taken refuge since 1949. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and tries to prevent countries and United Nations entities from working with Taiwanese officials.
So, when Taiwanese officials reported their concern to Geneva that the new coronavirus was spreading between humans in late December, Tedros's team did not circulate that warning to WHO member states. WHO officials proceeded to echo China's claims that "preliminary investigations" didn't support that suspicion.
"The problem is not the WHO system. The system has good people," a senior Trump administration official said. "It's about comments made from the leadership — which went beyond what I am told their own staff wanted to say."
President Trump describes the organization as "China-centric" and threatens to withhold American funding from the WHO. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro added Thursday that China has installed "colonial-type proxies like Tedros" at various U.N. agencies.
Try to keep up said...
Americans are people.
The United States is a country.
homosexuality doesn't replenish life, there is no reason to give it special preferences said...
unlike the evil "People's Republic of China", in the United States, the country is the people
how revealing that you don't understand that what are Americans are doing is what the United States is doing
"gay" marriage ain't no marriage, everyone knows that.... said...
For years, the media complained that President Donald Trump wasn't holding enough press conferences.
Now, as the media's poor performance in his daily coronavirus press conferences is on worldwide display, they're begging him to leave his own press conferences, and leave them alone to craft their anti-Trump storylines.
When March polls showed Trump receiving unusually high marks for his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the media receiving their traditionally low marks for it, many journalists began pushing for censorship of the press conferences.
While many outlets tried this approach, it obviously failed with viewers who turned to other outlets for the news they sought.
The media, however, continued to be mocked for the prevalence of silly and unserious questions from reporters who clearly think they come off better outside their echo chambers than they do:
In an attempt to regain control, the media have shifted to a new approach. Trump's daily press conferences with updates on the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic are actually bad for him, yeah that's the ticket!
The New York Times' Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, who would be known for their extreme anti-Trump posture and histrionic analysis if it weren't shared by nearly everyone else in the White House press corps, laid out their case in a tendentious essay that the usual followers at many media outlets echoed throughout the day.
The article claims that "White House allies and Republican lawmakers" — not the embarrassed media — are deeply concerned by the briefings. Sen. Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican known for nightly telling television audiences his senate committee will someday do things in response to horrific wrongdoing by the agencies they oversee, said Trump should drop the press conferences to once a week. Sniping also came in, reportedly, from Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Representative Susan Brooks of Indiana.
Martin and Haberman emphasized that polling shows Trump trails governors and medical experts in surveys of who the public trusts.
However, they noticeably failed to mention that the media trails far behind all of them, and is the only group underwater out of all the institutions and public leaders surveyed.
Whereas Trump has a 22-point net approval rating in the poll they mentioned, the media's net approval rating was negative 11 points, a 33-point difference.
That very important and relevant fact was studiously hidden by Martin and Haberman from the public, as per usual.
Instead, the "journalists" highlight that Trump's job approval has ticked down a bit. That's true, and is due not to the president spending too much time at his press conferences, but at frustration that he's following the media's lead in focusing on the serious public health crisis at the expense of the traumatic costs of the shutdown.
Those who virulently loathe him, such as those in the media, would not give Trump positive ratings even if their lives depended upon it.
Others support him seemingly no matter what he does.
But those outside those extremes are able to balance competing thoughts.
They can approve of virus suppression attempts while not thinking it should go on perpetually, as the media are pushing for.
They can support initial efforts while getting annoyed and losing patience with Trump bending the knee to Coronavirus concerns at the expense of all other concerns.
The Coronavirus pandemic has three major battle fronts: public health, economic, media.
Whatever his flaws, Trump understands that all three battles must be waged.
The deadly Coronavirus must be fought lest it overwhelm hospitals.
The economic collapse must be fought lest the "cure be worse than the disease," as he's fond of saying.
And the media — which are currently parroting Communist Chinese government propaganda, engaged in cartoonishly hostile postures, and showing opposition to any discussion of an exit strategy — must also be contended with strongly if the other two fronts are to have any chance of success.
It is rather absurd on its face to suggest that the president of the United States should not be managing his own press conferences no matter the situation. But in a situation that marries public health, economic, and media crises, it's even more absurd. The media would like the federal government to continue focusing on the public health issue at the expense of the others. Seen that way, their push to remove Trump from his press conferences is understandable, since he keeps emphasizing media malfeasance and the economic shutdown, both barriers to the continued exclusive focus on the public health crisis.
There is no Republican in existence who handles media malfeasance as well as Trump.
It is obvious that the media objective is to turn the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic into Trump's "Katrina."
Trump doing press conferences is a major frustration in their ability to do that. That's why the media are trying to pressure him to stop doing them.
For the average American, it is difficult to navigate the news, politics, and policy in an environment where so very many in the media are actively framing every event and data point through the lens of how it can be used to hurt Trump.
Far too many in the news media are not focused on conveying information that is true or factual, and certainly not whether it is good for America or for its citizens.
The simple calculus is to push the envelope as far as they think they can get away with in their goal to ensure Trump does not win re-election.
When the president and other leaders, along with tens of millions of regular Americans, are actively trying to figure out what's best for the nation during a legitimate national emergency, one that is unprecedented and with fast-changing information, compounded by the full shut-down of a capitalist economy, it is an added burden on citizens to have to contend with a media in large part committed to misinformation, dishonesty and outright propaganda.
No, Trump should not abandon his daily press briefings because of media pressure.
He should of course keep speaking to the American people who elected him.
He should understand that the media pressure to keep him from focusing on reopening the American economy is of course a trap.
Once the media get through emphasizing the likely apex of deaths in the coming days, Trump will need to fight the media's pressure.
He will need to do press conferences to keep corrupt and disingenuous media from telling falsehoods and spinning the news.
He will need to do press conferences to provide leadership on the economic crisis the country faces. And he will need to do press conferences to communicate the nation's plan for handling the next 18 months of a public health crisis
Dancing with Death or as Jim Jones would say, "Pass the kool-aid!" said...
The list is macabre. Clearly. But one day ahead of Easter Sunday, there is a message behind it.
One week ago, CNN's Gary Tuchman asked evangelical church members in Ohio if attending services might be putting their lives at risk and those of others in the community.
Church members cited spiritual insurance from "the blood of Jesus" and dismissed concerns for themselves, for fellow church members, and for others. So faith-filled they are bulletproof.
As it happened, the Christian Post a week earlier reported the deaths of three Christian pastors from COVID-19: from Shreveport, La., from New York City (Harlem), and another from Virginia who died in North Carolina on his way home from Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
The last, Larry Spradlin, a minister and blues musician inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2016, had called coverage of the novel coronavirus pandemic politically motivated "mass hysteria" designed to hurt President Trump.
I started a list. Death, it seems, is very ecumenical.
1. Eddie Lee Hunter, Baptist, Alexander City, AL
2. Lawrence Wilkes, Reformed Church in America, Anaheim, CA
3. Alex Bernard, Assembly of God, Downey, CA
4. Anthony Pigee, Sr., Life of Faith Community Center, Los Angeles, CA
5. LuciusHall, 1st Church of Love and Faith, Chicago, IL
6. Keith Burgess, Missioinary Baptist, Chicago, IL
7. Angel Escamilla, Assemblies of God, Naperville, IL
8. Gilbert L. Barnes (+ wife), Missionary Baptist, Marrero, LA
9. Ronnie Hampton, Free Methodist, Shreveport, LA
10. Harry Blake, Baptist, Shreveport, LA
11. Leon Franklin, Baptist, St. James Parish, LA
12. Robert Earl Smith Sr., Church of God in Christ, Flint, MI(
13. Kevelin Jones, Church of God in Christ, Flint, MI
14. Kejuane Bates, Baptist, Natchez, MS
15. H. Gene Sykes, Baptist, Bayonne, NJ
16. Jorge Ortiz-Garay, Catholic, Brooklyn, NY
17. Isaac Graham, Baptist, New York, NY
18. Richard Guastella, Catholic, New York, NY
19. Gioacchino Basile, Catholic, Queens, NY
20. Alvin Charles McElroy, Baptist, Riverhead, NY
21. Scott Elijah, AME, Yonkers, NY
22. Merl Dry, Apostolic Pentecostal, Tulsa, OK
23. Tim Russell, Presbyterian, Memphis, TN
24. Landon Spradlin, nondenominational, Gretna, VA
25. Adrea Bowman, Episcopal, Ellensburg, WA
26. Vladimir, Dyachenko, Word of Grace Bible Church, Vancouver, WA
By now there are over two dozen dead Christian pastors on it. From Michigan to Louisiana. From New York to California. Reports say all died from the coronavirus. All presumably as insured by "the blood of Jesus" as the Ohio church members. Many on the list are African American and from communities hit especially hard by the pandemic..
...Controversy swirls over whether Christians should gather in churches tomorrow to celebrate the Resurrection with a pandemic loose in their communities. With stay-at-home orders in place in many states, most churches will be closed or hold services online tomorrow. There are, however, a few holdouts who plan services in defiance of police orders (Reuters):
"Most U.S. churches are expected to be closed on Sunday, and a broad majority of observant Americans are expected to follow authorities' recommendations to avoid crowds to limit the spread of the potentially lethal COVID-19 respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.
"Satan and a virus will not stop us," said the Reverend Tony Spell, 42, pastor of the evangelical Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He expects a crowd of more than 2,000 to gather in worship at his megachurch on Sunday.
"God will shield us from all harm and sickness," Spell said in an interview. "We are not afraid. We are called by God to stand against the Antichrist creeping into America's borders. We will spread the Gospel."
Others plan to dance with Death to prove their faith tomorrow in Idaho, Kentucky, in California, and elsewhere.
And the list above will grow.
RBG is a has-been said...
these people are clearly deluded
but, why does it merit comment here?
they are small in number
and there are reports of stray groups engaged in secular activities ignoring the social distancing guidelines
this week, I saw a group of teen lacrosse players crowded together in the park while their parents snapped pictures
as usual, the hateful bigotry of TTF transcends any crisis
ha=ha said...
paaaaarents snapped!
Data from Яumplandia said...
It took Trump 70 days to act after his first briefing on COVID-19.
In those 70 days, Trump could have developed a national testing program, issued a national shelter-in-place order, and invoked the Defense Production Act to increase the amount of personal protective equipment and ventilators we had available for frontline healthcare workers.
Instead, Trump spent those 70 days telling the public that COVID-19 was everything from "just" the flu, to a "Democratic hoax." He told the American people that our economy wouldn't suffer and that COVID-19 would magically disappear.
In those 70 days, the number of cases skyrocketed, and we have now almost depleted the $105 million in federal funding we had to respond to COVID-19.
Instead of preemptively taking action to increase testing and slow the spread of COVID-19, Trump did nothing. Meanwhile, Emergency Departments and Intensive Care Units across the country began to overflow, and hundreds of thousands of Americans became infected.
Because Trump waited 70 days to take any action and continues to refuse to implement a widespread testing program or a national shelter-in-place order, our country is still weeks behind other countries in testing, and hospitals are almost out of personal protective equipment and ventilators.
Table 1. US Deaths involving coronavirus Diseases 2019 (COVID-10) [only, but the table includes more data]:
US COVID-19 Deaths:
02/01/20.....0
03/07/20.....18
03/21/20.....423
03/28/20.....1,891
"these people are clearly deluded
but, why does it merit comment here?"
On the off chance that one of those deluded religious people will read the post, reconsider the "spiritual insurance" of the "blood of Jesus," and decide to stay home and protect their own lives and those in their community.
It's worth a shot.
Denver Post: Trump Is Playing Games With Our Lives
President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It's the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives. For the good of this nation during what should be a time of unity, he must stop.
The federal government should be procuring medicine, masks, and ventilators and distributing them to states on a set formula based on population, rate of infection and need.
Instead, Trump's messaging makes it feel as though he will watch with glee from the White House as people suffer in states being led by his enemies. If that's not the case, then the president needs to act as though he's working on behalf of all of us, not just those who voted for him or cow-towed to his corrupt administration.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "gayness doesn't replenish life, there is no reason to give it special preferences "
With the world dying from overpopulation there is no reason to give heterosexuals special preferences.
"Troll,
You could save yourself a lot of typing by just saying "Nuh-uh!" after everything you paste"
I looked through Wyatt/Regina's posts for anything that needed debunking and it was all so obviously childish there was no need for me to respond.
Keep it up you two, its helpful to show everyone how stupid you are,lol :)
WHY HASN'T TRUMP ISSUED A NATIONAL STAY AT HOME ORDER???? said...
Trump has yet to issue a national stay at home order resulting in needless deaths.
Trump has yet to implement a national coronavirus testing and monitoring program to track the spread of the virus and cut it off.
Trump has been AWOL just when the United States needs a leader most.
The worst outbreak of the pandemic in the world is the United States. Every place in the world has done better than Trump.
Multiple investigations have documented that the Trump response to the outbreak was characterized by weeks of delay, confusion, infighting and consistent efforts by Trump and other top administration officials to minimize the risk, a record encapsulated in the banner headline across Sunday's Washington Post: "70 Days of denial, delays and dysfunction. A blistering report Monday from the Health and Human Services Department's Inspector General found hospitals facing "severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results" and "widespread shortages" of personal protective equipment that "put staff and patients at risk."
From all their demands in this thread that gays be harmed Wyatt/Regina are obviously really, really angry at harmless lgbt people. Why is that you two?
Are you angry that I've so effectively countered your b.s.?
Or is it that you two have same sex attractions you won't accept?
US overtakes Italy to have highest coronavirus death toll in the world after 2,000 deaths in a day said...
The United States has reached a grim milestone in the fight against coronavirus, passing Italy to become the country with the most deaths in the world.
On Saturday, 2,108 people died in the U.S. in the past 24 hours – the first country in the world to record more than 2,000 deaths in a single day.
As a result, the U.S. has now overtaken Italy's total of 18,849. It has recorded more than 503,000 cases.
The pandemic's epicenter has long shifted to Europe and the U.S., which also now has by far the largest number of confirmed cases, with more than half a million. It saw more than 35,000 new positive infections in the last 24 hours, according to Johns Hopkins University.
However, experts on the White House's coronavirus task force suggested the outbreak within America's borders is starting to level off slowly.
"As encouraging as they are, we have not reached the peak," Dr. Deborah Birx said Friday.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump insisted he would not reopen the country until it is safe.
"I want to get it open as soon as possible," he said at a Good Friday briefing while adding: "The facts are going to determine what I do."...
Health experts have warned that if the country rolls back restrictions too quickly, case levels could once again begin to soar, especially without widespread testing to determine who might be a carrier of the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious-diseases expert, said this week that a timeline for reopening the country would entail reviewing the data day-by-day.
"The virus kind of decides whether or not it's appropriate to open it," he told CNN. "The one thing you don't want to do is you don't want to get out there prematurely and then wind up backtracking."
More than 1.7 million people have been infected with coronavirus worldwide. More than 100,000 have died, while more than 388,000 have recovered from the illness.
Secret Service Protected Trump Family On 4000 Trips In Last Three Years, Often For Trump Org-Related Business
Via Citizens For Responsibility and Ethics:
Last fiscal year, the Trump family took more trips that required Secret Service protection than the Obama family took in seven, according to a budget document released by the Treasury Department.
On average, Obama's family took 133.3 protected trips per year, while the Trump family has taken an average of 1,625 annually. Much of the Trump family's known travel has been to promote Trump Organization businesses, which President Trump still owns and profits from.
Every President and his family deserve Secret Service protection. But the President's private business should reimburse taxpayers for money spent at Trump's businesses or in support of them.
In February 2017, Eric and Don Jr. flew to Dubai to open a Trump-branded golf club, which cost the Secret Service more than $200,000. The same month, Eric flew to the Dominican Republic to potentially relaunch a failed Trump-branded resort project, which cost $20,000.
Eric Trump has visited Uruguay twice for Trump Organization business, costing taxpayers $97,830 in 2017,and $80,786 in 2019. And those are just the receipts we have obtained so far.
What we do know is that the President's frequent trips to Trump branded properties put taxpayer money directly into the coffers of the Trump Organization.
A 12x increase in any budget item is bound to attract attention, and the President's business should reimburse the Treasury for taxpayers funds spent to support his business directly or indirectly.
Priya and the Pope agree:
Pope Francis has said the coronavirus pandemic is one of "nature's responses" to humans ignoring the current ecological crisis. In an email Wednesday the pontiff said the outbreak offered an opportunity to slow down the rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.
"We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that 18 months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods?" the Pope said. "I don't know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature's responses," he added.
The world cannot support an exponentially growing human population. The earth is FINITE my dear evangelical christians. There is no god to save us from ourselves.
Joe Biden +11 Over Trump In New National Poll
This is why Republicans want to close down 95% of election day polling places and deny the people the right to vote by mail - they know they can't win a free and fair election.
VA Gov. Northam signs LGBT anti-discrimination act into law said...
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed a bill into law that would expand non-discrimination protections on public employment, housing and credit on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or race.
The bill, like the gun control law Northam signed Friday, goes into effect on July 1.
"This legislation sends a strong, clear message—Virginia is a place where all people are welcome to live, work, visit, and raise a family," said Northam, according to a report from WRIC.
"We are building an inclusive Commonwealth where there is opportunity for everyone, and everyone is treated fairly. No longer will LGBTQ Virginians have to fear being fired, evicted, or denied service in public places because of who they are."
According to the news outlet, the law marks a milestone for the South, making Virginia the first state to enact "comprehensive protections" for the LGBT community.
After the signing, LGBT advocates weighed in.
"Right now, as the country and the world deals with an unprecedented pandemic, it is more important than ever to ensure that leaders are looking out for all of us," Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) said in a statement. "In this period of uncertainty, it is vital that we are all protected from bias as we earn a living, access housing and healthcare, and seek goods and services."
In the past year HRC spent $250,000 in electing pro-LGBTQ candidates across Virginia, and in November of 2019, both the state Senate and General Assembly flipped Democrat.
Under current law, there are no explicit protections for workers or tenants based on sexual orientation — both in the state of Virginia and on a federal level.
The move from the governor comes as the Supreme Court mulls whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination over "sex," covers gender identity and sexual orientation.
The Trump administration has weighed in against the workers in the sexual orientation cases, arguing that the language of Title VII does not cover gay and lesbian employees.
"In 1964, the ordinary public meaning of 'sex' was biological sex. It did not encompass transgender status," Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco and Department of Justice attorneys wrote in a SCOTUS brief.
Francisco said the statute should be interpreted specifically in the context of racial discrimination, not gender identity or sexuality.
"In the particular context of Title VII — legislation originally designed to eliminate employment discrimination against racial and other minorities — it was especially clear that the prohibition on discrimination because of 'sex' referred to unequal treatment of men and women in the workplace," they added.
When you discriminate against a man for being in a same sex marriage, you are discriminating on the basis of sex - if that man was a woman, he wouldn't have been discriminated against.
You can't separate discrimination based on sexual orientation from discrimination on the basis of sex. They are one in the same.
Amóne Tácca said...
Conservative Jew coughs in cop's face
Because without religion we would have no morality.
"If I decide to run for office, I'll produce my tax returns, absolutely and I would love to do that." - Donald Trump May 2014
Robert Reich said...
I'm old enough to remember when labour secretaries were supposed to protect working people.
In normal times, this would be disgraceful. During a pandemic, with more than 16.8 million Americans out of work, it's morally repugnant.
Labour Secretary Eugene Scalia, sone of Antonin, playing enormous but under-the-radar role:
- Weakened Unemployment Insurance benefits for millions;
- Department of Labour has NOT required employers to follow CDC guidance;
- Made it easier for employers to escape paid leave benefits.
Hunting wabbits said...
https://www.123greetings.com/events/easter/happy_easter/puppy_easter.html
Happy Easter Everybody!
JackFknTwist said...
Apart from my disgust at Donald Trump, I asked myself what precisely is it about him that makes him such a disaster for America.
If the economy was going well how could Trump be bad?
The answer, it appears to me, is his failure to have any concept of planning, of anticipation, of preparedness.
Trump never looks beyond his nose.
He does not study warnings, he does not brief himself, he does not plan, he does not take advice.
Trump has charmed himself into believing that everything will work out just fine.
And there is little in his experience to change his mind. He has gotten away with all his frauds, his bogus university, his stiffing of contractors, his flirtation with Putin and his property speculations, not least in Moscow.
But has he prepared for a pandemic as Obama did?
Has he heeded the warnings of mass casualties as warned by Bill Gates in his 2015 TED Lecture?
Has Trump prepared for an environmental disaster ?
The answer of course is that Trump has no concept of 'preparation'. He doesn't do it in his life not in his political position.
With Trump it is immediate gratification, what are the ratings? what does FOX say about me? am I popular on Facebook (the measure of his base)?
Reading summaries of expert advice ? -never.
Heeding warnings from from health epidemiologists or environmental experts? Never.
Acting on his 'hunch' ? yes.
Lazy, loose, dim, without any attention to detail, the most dangerous and damaging President that it was possible to put in office.
And his inability to plan beyond his nose is the fulcrum of his incompetence.
Oversight Panel: Trump Admin. Didn't Distribute Stockpile Supplies Based On States' Needs
Trump health officials said that 3.5 billion N95 masks were needed to respond to this epidemic but only .33% of that number was distributed to states.
The Department of Health and Human Services said the Trump administration did not distribute supplies from the National Strategic Stockpile to states based on their individual needs during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
The remaining 10% of PPE is reserved for federal workers and will not be distributed to states, HHS staff told the committee.
"Now that the national stockpile has been depleted of critical equipment, it appears that the Administration is leaving states to fend for themselves, to scour the open market for these scarce supplies, and to compete with each other and federal agencies in a chaotic, free-for-all bidding war," committee chairwoman Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.
MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: Trump Privately Proposed Just Letting Coronavirus "Wash Over" America - Killing Hundreds of Thousands or Millions of Americans But Keeping the Economy Moving
PS/ Do *not* get it twisted: at the time Trump made this proposal, he had been *fully* briefed - repeatedly, over and over, for two months - on the death toll that would result from not imposing non-pharmaceutical interventions like physical distancing and stay-at-home orders.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that "no one is going to deny" that more lives could have been saved during the coronavirus crisis if the Trump administration had implemented social distancing guidelines prior to March.
The New York Times reported Saturday that the administration's top public health experts, including Fauci, concluded on Feb. 21 that the U.S. would need to move toward aggressive social distancing even if it would disrupt the economy and millions of American lives.
"As I've said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint," Fauci said. "We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it's not. But it is what it is. We are where we are right now."
And Trump has still yet to issue a national stay-at-home order!
Trump Promotes Service By Hateful Scamvangelical
The Dallas Morning News reports:
President Donald Trump said Friday that he'll attend Easter services on Sunday, virtually, along with congregants of Dallas' First Baptist Church, where his friend and adviser is senior pastor. "I'm going to be watching Pastor Robert Jeffress," Trump said at his daily coronavirus task force briefing. "He's been a great guy, and I'm going to be watching on a laptop. Now a laptop is not the same as being in his church or being in another church."
But he said, like other Americans, he's avoided crowds for three weeks, and it's not yet time to return to normal activities. As for Jeffress, he was one of Trump's earliest and most vocal backers among evangelical Christian leaders in the 2016 campaign. He has been steadfast in defend the president against complaints that his personal morals haven't always measured up to the standards of religious conservatives.
Jeffress has said that all Jews and Mormons go to hell, that Obama was the precursor to the antichrist, that LGBTs need rescuing from Satan's deception, that God designed the borders of the United States, that there will be civil war if Trump is removed from office, and that God gave Trump the moral authority to have foreign leaders assassinated. And that's just a wee taste of his crackpot batsh*ttery.
"Robert Jeffress says "you can't be saved by being a Jew," and "Mormonism is a heresy from the pit of hell." He's said the same about Islam. Such a religious bigot should not be giving the prayer that opens the United States Embassy in Jerusalem."
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 14, 2018
"Wishing all a safe and blessed Easter Sunday. I will be tuning into Pastor @robertjeffress at Church in Dallas, Texas tomorrow morning at 10:20 AM Eastern.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
citizen of the home of the brave said...
Americans say, 57% to 37%, they approve of the government's handling of coronavirus, a significant uptick from the previous HuffPost/YouGov poll, when half approved.
The public think Trump has done better than former Vice President Joe Biden would, 39% to 31%, and the rest unsure or doubting there'd be much difference.
Cuberly Trois said...
I can't figure out what's at work here. Spanky is obviously playing the talibanjelicals for all they've got. The christian white nationalist wing of the GOP has never been this close to power before so they're falling all over themselves praising Spanky.
Both parties in this scenario are amoral train wrecks. The hypocrisy between them is so off the charts. Spanky is as much a christian as I am...as in not. The talibanjelicals hyper-morality shaming suddenly doesn't matter anymore, unless they set their sights on those they choose to harm of course.
Marc: The Social Gadfly said...
Ya know, technically Jeffress was right about Obama being the precursor to the antichrist.
Andrea Bocelli: Music For Hope - Live From Duomo di Milano
from the land of the free and the home of the brave said...
"I can't figure out what's at work here. Spanky is obviously playing the talibanjelicals for all they've got. The christian white nationalist wing of the GOP has never been this close to power before so they're falling all over themselves praising Spanky.
Both parties in this scenario are amoral train wrecks. The hypocrisy between them is so off the charts. Spanky is as much a christian as I am...as in not. The talibanjelicals hyper-morality shaming suddenly doesn't matter anymore, unless they set their sights on those they choose to harm of course."
I don't think the lunatic fringe realize how repulsive remarks like this seem to most people
vital question for America: "Are you better off than you would be if Joe BIden were President?"
A: oh yeah
The coronavirus has rocked the U.S. economy, but the financial toll would be much worse without President Trump at the controls. As an experienced leader, Trump knows exactly what to do to protect America's robust private sector from the temporary economic shutdown needed to safeguard public health.
Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the White House has made it a priority to support the millions of U.S. businesses that have been forced to suspend or curtail operations to help "flatten the curve" of the pandemic.
"We must sacrifice together, because we are all in this together, and we will come through together," the President said during one of his daily coronavirus press briefings. "It's the invisible enemy. That's always the toughest enemy, the invisible enemy."
The $2.2 trillion stimulus bill the president just signed into law, for instance, allocates hundreds of billions of dollars in low-interest, government-guaranteed loans for the small businesses that are the lifeblood of our economy. As long as recipients use the money to return or keep workers on payroll and meet other normal operating expenses, those loans automatically transform into grants that never have to be repaid.
The emergency unemployment benefits included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act will take care of any type of business, while the sizable stimulus payments going out to almost all American households will infuse consumers with cash that will help them to survive to fuel the coming economic recovery.
President Trump's affinity for nixing costly, time-wasting regulations has come in particularly handy during this crisis, as well. After expediting the approval process for coronavirus vaccine candidates and eliminating obstacles to experimental treatments, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently authorized a groundbreaking coronavirus antibody test that will determine whether individuals have already contracted the disease and potentially developed an immunity that would allow them to safely return to their normal activities.
While Donald Trump's extensive business experience perfectly prepared him to deftly guide the U.S. economy through the treacherous waters of this unprecedented voluntary shutdown, the extremist policies favored by presumptive Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden would only exacerbate our economic troubles, potentially crippling the entire country.
We don't have to speculate as to what Biden would have done differently in response to the pandemic — the former vice president has already told us.
First and foremost, Biden would not have implemented life-saving travel restrictions on China in the early days of the outbreak, as President Trump has been praised for doing by the nation's top public health experts. At the time, Biden argued that the White House was overreacting to the novel coronavirus threat, even calling the President's response "xenophobic," but he now acts as though he supported travel restrictions all along.
The rest of Biden's comments over the course of this crisis have been equally disjointed and nonsensical, making it painfully clear that he's completely out of his depth on this issue. The country is fortunate that Biden isn't responsible for safeguarding our prosperity at this critical juncture.
Even after the economy fully reopens, though, a Biden administration would be more than our recovering economy could bear. His plans to "get rid of fossil fuels," for instance, would needlessly sacrifice hundreds of thousands of American jobs while raising the cost of living for working families all over the country. Meanwhile, his plan to raise taxes by over $4 trillion would undo the long-term benefits of the recent coronavirus relief measures, saddling families with an unnecessary financial burden at a time when many of them can least afford it.
During this trying time, our country is truly fortunate to have a business-minded leader who understands the value of government restraint and the power of the private sector — and we'll be even more fortunate to have him guiding our recovery in the aftermath of this unprecedented crisis.
Trump knew by the end of January there was a serious pandemic in the states. He has still yet to issue a national stay-at-home order leaving people to die needlessly. And no national testing and tracking strategy either.
I guarantee you Joe Biden would have issued a national stay at home order long before now and would have implemented a national testing and tracking system.
Now that a crisis is upon him, Trump's incompetence is showing its deadly results - he's just too lazy to do any of the work of managing and coordinating on a national level.
for millennia, society has known that two genders are necessary to make a marriage said...
Andrew Cuomo says he agrees with Trump and wants NYC, the only place that should have closed, to re-open as soon as possible
Rump is an idiot as his Easter Sunday tweet storm proves said...
"re-open as soon as possible"
Reopen your non-essential business if you want but here are some important facts for you to ponder before you do so.
South Korea has had 4 deaths per 1 million people, Singapore 1 death per million, and Taiwan 0.2 deaths per million. The United States: 39 per million — and rising fast.
And you think Rump is doing a great job! IDIOTS!
Here's who's doing a great job:
April 11, 2020: ANNAPOLIS, MD—Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, chairman of the National Governors Association, and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, vice chair, issued the following statement today:
"Governors across the country are leading the on-the-ground response to the national COVID-19 pandemic, implementing a variety of stay at home orders and other aggressive measures that are successfully flattening the curve of the spread of the virus. While these public health strategies are working to protect the American people, they result in catastrophic damage to state economies.
"Despite this grave challenge, the recently passed federal CARES Act contained zero funding to offset these drastic state revenue shortfalls. To stabilize state budgets and to make sure states have the resources to battle the virus and provide the services the American people rely on, Congress must provide immediate fiscal assistance directly to all states.
"We must be allowed to use any state stabilization funds for replacement of lost revenue, and these funds should not be tied to only COVID-19 related expenses. Congress must amend the CARES Act to allow this flexibility for existing federal funding.
"Moreover, Congress must appropriate an additional $500 billion specifically for all states and territories to meet the states' budgetary shortfalls that have resulted from this unprecedented public health crisis. This critical stabilization funding for states must be separate from much needed fiscal stabilization for local governments.
"In the absence of unrestricted fiscal support of at least $500 billion from the federal government, states will have to confront the prospect of significant reductions to critically important services all across this country, hampering public health, the economic recovery, and—in turn—our collective effort to get people back to work."
Trump was warned many times about coronovirus begining in November and refused to take them seriously
As the deadly coronavirus outbreak rapidly spread across America in February and March, President Trump repeatedly asserted that "nobody could have predicted something like this." But a review of government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House and went unheeded.
Trump has since tried to blame the World Health Organization (WHO) and China for his failure to act even though both warned him in January that he needed to take quick action to fight the pandemic. Trump and Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous would have you believe Trump ignored ten or 15 warnings from various health agencies, spokespeople, and his own staff that a deadly pandemic was here but if only he had gotten a more strenuous warning from WHO or China he would have listened and acted. That's obviously not the case with Trump, he ignored repeated warnings and WHO or China being a little louder about it wouldn't have got him off his ass to do something to save lives.
Other countries have had minor impacts from Coronavirus. That the United States has the highest number of infections on earth rests solely on Trump's shoulders.
On January 30th, the WHO declares a global health emergency.
On Feb 28th, four weeks later Trump declares the virus will magically disappear
On March 9th he compares it to the flu.
On March tenth he says it will go away.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "for millennia, society has known that two genders are necessary to make a marriage"
Your claim is proven false by millennia of same sex marriages.
Gays and lesbians deserve the same rights heterosexuals have - no special rights for christians!
Trump has yet to issue a national stay-at-home order, ame with national testing and tracking - thousands are dying needlessly because of Trump's inaction. .
Guaranteed Joe Biden would have issued those orders months ago and saved lives.
Trump Claims He Can Force States To Reopen Economy
President Donald Trump on Monday declared that he could force states across the country to reopen their economies, even if those states' governors believe that doing so would be dangerous. As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman points out, Trump's declaration completely contradicts his own administration's messages about states' rights, as well as Trump's own message that it is individual states' responsibility to buy their own medical equipment without help from the federal government.
Trump is failing badly at the challenge coronavirus presents.
Chris B said...
Donald J. Trump "Leadership: Whatever happens, you're responsible. If it doesn't happen, you're responsible."
It's the mark of a con man to hear Trump say he has the power to control everything with the pandemic, but then blame the governors and say it's their job if something goes wrong. Trump started out saying "I alone can fix it" but now says "I don't take responsibility at all"!
Trump promised that on day one of his presidency he would replace Obamacare with "something terrific, everyone will be covered."
He broke that promise, there's been no Republican health care plan and instead Trump and the Republicans have attacked Obamacare non-stop in order to take away health care from tens of millions of Americans and remove the protections 100 million Americans now have for preexisting conditions.
Just when Obamacare is needed most, Republicans and Trump are fighting tooth and nail in court to take it away.
Small wonder christianists think Trump is god reincarnate. He contradicts himself same as the Bible contradicts itself.
BatmanLA said...
If Trump forces states to reopen it's his way of letting the virus "wash over the country", he's trying to kill as many as he can, and hope they're all Democrats... Well I got news for you pumpkin head, the South is still raging with the virus and it's getting worse there. Go ahead and try to force the red states to open... see what that gets you bucky!
Trump Gets "Four Pinocchios" On Malaria Drug Claims
Over the course of only a few weeks, posts online, the media and politicians turned chloroquine from an unknown drug to a "100% coronavirus cure," misleading the public on its effectiveness and engendering unintended but negative consequences.
Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as treatments for covid-19 are not yet backed by reliable scientific evidence. In a pandemic, it's important for everyone to follow the lead of scientists. Rumors on the Internet are the least reliable source of information. And politicians are not qualified to provide scientific advice, despite even the best intentions.
In particular, Trump's incorrect comments on the drugs and his role in advocating for their use, based on minimal and flimsy evidence, sets a bad example. His advocacy for this unproven treatment provides potentially false hope and has led to shortages for people who rely on the drugs. The president earns Four Pinocchios.
**Wyatt and Regina Hardiman have also been pushing the false claim that chloroquine is a cure for coronavirus.
Pope Francis Endorses Universal Basic Income
In a remarkable Easter Sunday letter to members of social movements around the world, Pope Francis, noting that the widespread suffering caused by the global coronavirus pandemic does not fall evenly, suggested that the crisis warranted the establishment of a universal basic income. He described it also as an opportunity for affluent societies to "downshift" and re-evaluate patterns of consumption and exploitation.
"This may be the time to consider a universal basic wage which would acknowledge and dignify the noble, essential tasks you carry out," Pope Francis wrote. "It would ensure and concretely achieve the ideal, at once so human and so Christian, of no worker without rights."
"I hope that this time of danger will free us from operating on automatic pilot, shake our sleepy consciences and allow a humanist and ecological conversion that puts an end to the idolatry of money and places human life and dignity at the center," Pope Francis said.
Trump Retweets Nutbag's Call To Fire Medical Authority Anthony Fauci
President Trump publicly signaled his frustration on Sunday with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government's top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.
Mr. Trump reposted a Twitter message that said "Time to #FireFauci" as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the United States. The president privately has been irritated at times with Dr. Fauci, but the Twitter post was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.
The tweet came amid a flurry of messages blasted out by the president on Sunday defending his handling of the coronavirus, which has come under sharp criticism, and pointing the finger instead at China, the World Health Organization, President Barack Obama, the nation's governors, Congress, Democrats generally and the news media.
Typical Trump - its everyone else's fault but his own.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous were just claiming Fauci standing beside Trump at his "briefings" was proof Trump was being responsible. Fauci dared to disagree with Trump that hydroxychloroquine was a cure all (Trump and his friends profit off of chloroquine sales).
Golf, handshakes and a Mar-a-Lago conga line: Squandered week highlights Trump's lack of COVID-19 focus said...
By Friday, March 6, there was no escaping the fact that the spread of the novel coronavirus would soon upend American life.
There were confirmed cases in two dozen states, including Washington, where a state of emergency had been declared after at least 10 people died in the previous week in connection with a single nursing home. New York City was experiencing an alarming upward trend in cases. A cruise ship carrying infected passengers idled off the California coast, waiting for a port to allow them to disembark. Hospitals, nursing homes and health officials around the country worried over a lack of testing capabilities and a shortage of medical equipment.
The annual music festival South by Southwest was canceled that day, joining an array of scuttled movie releases and concert tours. The Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points. And just a day earlier, the chief of the World Health Organization (WHO) had explicitly beseeched world leaders to prepare, warning that the "epidemic can be pushed back, but only with a collective, coordinated and comprehensive approach that engages the entire machinery of government."
Armed with all of that evidence, President Donald Trump spent the next week treating COVID-19 in much the same way that he had over the previous two months: he hosted large gatherings at Mar-a-Lago, went golfing, attended fundraisers, dispensed misinformation about the virus and flouted social distancing guidelines known to stem its spread. If his behavior was meant to be a model for Americans to follow, the message was clear — life could proceed as normal.
Trump and his closest supporters now insist that he always understood the threat COVID-19 posed to the U.S., despite his repeated assurances that it was under control and less harmful than the flu. But perhaps the clearest indication of Trump's dismissal of the threat the virus posed is an examination of how he spent the week leading up to Friday March 13, when he declared that the virus constituted a national emergency...
Trump started his workday on Friday, March 6 with a reality check that COVID-19 was going to be more expensive than he anticipated. That morning in the Diplomatic Room, wearing his situation outfit of khakis, a white dress shirt and a windbreaker jacket bearing the presidential seal, he signed a bill authorizing $8.3 billion for healthcare and vaccine research. Trump remarked that he had only asked for $2.5 billion...
Then Trump left for Air Force One and several stops as he moved southward. The journey, and the rest of his week, was a highlight reel of how to ignore the social distancing guidelines the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had first mentioned in late February.
His first stop was a tornado-ravaged Tennessee, where he shook hands with his greeters who met him at the tarmac, including Gov. Bill Lee. At nearby Cookeville, he crowded in with residents near their flattened homes, shaking hands and patting shoulders. At a nearby church, roughly a hundred residents — ranging from children to the elderly — squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder and craned over a folding table to shake Trump's hand. One man climbed over the table for a selfie with Trump...
When a reporter asked whether a fear of his supporters infecting each other with the virus might cause him to end the political rallies that have become his trademark, Trump replied, "It doesn't bother them and it doesn't bother me."
He then headed to Atlanta for a visit to the CDC. On the tarmac, another group of officials waited to shake hands. They included Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp and Rep. Doug Collins, the latter who would later self-quarantine after learning he had been in contact with somebody infected with coronavirus at the Conservative Political Action Conference the previous week.
Trump's visit to the CDC had nearly been canceled over fears that an employee there had COVID-19. Trump took the opportunity to insist to reporters at the CDC facility that the country's virus testing capabilities could meet the demand...
"Anybody that wants a test can get a test," Trump said. That false statement contradicted Vice President Mike Pence, who had acknowledged a day earlier that the country did not have enough tests.
'The Trump Train' at Mar-a-Lago
Trump's final stop that day was Mar-a-Lago in Florida, where he would spend the next three nights. That Saturday, he spent six hours at the Trump International Golf Club, a ten-minute motorcade-ride away. Then it was back to the "Winter White House," the site that weekend of an estimated $10 million in fundraisers and the birthday shindig for Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend — former Fox News personality Kimberly Guilfoyle. The president's closest confidantes and some of the most powerful figures in the nation — including Vice President Pence, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham — gathered together under ballroom chandeliers and over gold-rimmed dinner plates. An Instagram video showed Trump helping to croon "Happy Birthday" to Guilfoyle, prompting her to yell: "Four more years!"
Fox News host Tucker Carlson later said that he drove to Mar-a-Lago that Saturday night and urged Trump to take the novel coronavirus more seriously. But the glitzy backdrop and a ballroom of attendees forming a conga line — or as it's called in Mar-a-Lago, "The Trump Train" — seemed removed from the reality that a deadly, ultra-contagious virus was quietly seeping through the country.
The festivities came with a unique hangover: a series of self-quarantines. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro had joined Trump, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner for a "working dinner" at Mar-a-Lago, and afterwards two of Bolsonaro's aides tested positive for the virus. Sen. Rick Scott, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, and Rep. Matt Gaetz, all of whom were at Mar-a-Lago, went into self-quarantine after learning they interacted with people who had been infected.
The president returned to his golf club on Sunday, this time hitting the links with several Washington Nationals players, one of whom — pitcher Patrick Corbin — posted to Instagram a photo of the president giving the thumbs-up while they all squeezed together for a group shot.
Like roughly 10 million other Americans, those baseball players soon found themselves out of work due to the novel coronavirus. Four days later, the baseball season was postponed indefinitely.
Trump got to the club early that day, and left by noon so he could attend a fundraiser brunch with nearly 900 people at Mar-a-Lago.
The next morning, Monday, Wall Street trading was halted within minutes of the market opening in an automatic emergency measure after the S&P 500 — an index of the largest corporations in the country — plunged 7%, in large part due to COVID-19 fears.
At the time of the halt, Trump was readying to leave Mar-a-Lago for the Orlando area, where he had another fundraiser planned. He spent two hours at an air conditioning magnate's 17,000 square foot mansion, where groups of supporters in the neighborhood pressed together to greet the arriving motorcade.
At the house, Trump reportedly delivered remarks at a closed-to-press luncheon, posed for photos with supporters, and participated in a "roundtable" with donors who gave his campaign $100,000. His campaign estimated the stop raised $4 million...
In the three days he had been gone, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in the country had more than doubled, from 262 to 583, according to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
Those numbers rose exponentially over the rest of a workweek during which Trump's White House continued to stare down the concept of social distancing....
This fascinating USA Today report of facts our stupid president committed continues at:
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2020/04/09/instead-prepping-coronavirus-trump-partied-golfed-held-fundraisers/2941076001/
why, oh why, didn't FDR attack the Nazis sooner? said...
Hong Kong (CNN)China has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the novel coronavirus, according to a central government directive and online notices published by two Chinese universities, that have since been removed from the web.
Under the new policy, all academic papers on Covid-19 will be subject to extra vetting before being submitted for publication. Studies on the origin of the virus will receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by central government officials, according to the now-deleted posts.
A medical expert in Hong Kong who collaborated with mainland researchers to publish a clinical analysis of Covid-19 cases in an international medical journal said his work did not undergo such vetting in February.
The increased scrutiny appears to be the latest effort by the Chinese government to control the narrative on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 100,000 lives and sickened 1.7 million people worldwide since it first broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December.
Rotating Rump said...
Again and again throughout the month of February 2020, Trump expressed confidence in China's handling of coronavirus and/or said China shouldn't do anything differently.
To be fair, Trump had understandable reasons for this. He wanted to maintain good relations to secure trade peace and to get needed medical supplies.
But there's another point here that continues to elude notice: Trump's praise of China's handling of coronavirus was absolutely central to his own downplaying of the threat. Again and again, Trump cited China's successes to argue that through collaboration, Trump and China were restraining coronavirus.
Trump's praise of China was central to maintaining his own early spin that he, too, had it totally under control. That turned out to be catastrophically wrong, and it's only after this became too overwhelming to ignore that Trump, joined by his propagandists, fully pivoted to blaming China, the current story line.
safari said...
NPR's morning news program had a segment on the promises Donald made and what was kept. It was, as you imagine, just a lot of "Donald promised this" and "didn't deliver".
Remember that Google testing site for instance? Yeah about that. Drive-up testing in Walmart parking lots? Yeah, that didn't happen either.
Carl Sagan said...
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
'Til Tuesday said...
I suspect that Trump is wanting a big announcement that the country is "reopened" on May 1st, and he's laying the groundwork to get rid of Dr. Fauci, who opposes it. I think his retweet of "time to #firefauci" is the start of it.
Over 2,700 medical workers in the Detroit area either have the Coronavirus or showing symptoms of it. Terrible.
How Mitch McConnell Became Trump's Enabler-in-Chief
Much more than what I've included at the link
On Thursday, March 12th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, could have insisted that he and his colleagues work through the weekend to hammer out an emergency aid package addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he recessed the Senate for a long weekend, and returned home to Louisville, Kentucky.
Soon after he left the Capitol, Democrats in the House of Representatives settled on a preliminary rescue package, working out the details with the Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The Senate was urgently needed for the next steps in the process. McConnell, though, was onstage in a Louisville auditorium, joking that his opponents "occasionally compare me to Darth Vader."
In leaving Washington for the long weekend, he had misjudged the moment. The hashtag #WheresMitch? was trending on Twitter. President Trump had declared a national emergency; the stock market had ended one of its worst weeks since the Great Recession. Nearly two thousand cases of COVID-19 had already been confirmed in America.
Eleven days later, the Senate still had not come up with a bill. The Times ran a scorching editorial titled "The Coronavirus Bailout Stalled. And It's Mitch McConnell's Fault." The Majority Leader had tried to jam through a bailout package that heavily favored big business. But by then five Republicans were absent in self-quarantine, and the Democrats forced McConnell to accept a $2.1-trillion compromise bill that reduced corporate giveaways and expanded aid to health-care providers and to hard-hit workers.
Several senators—including Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut—had raised alarms about the virus nearly two months before the Administration acted, whereas Trump had told reporters around the same time that he was "not concerned at all." And on February 27th, some three weeks after the impeachment trial ended, McConnell had defended the Administration's response, accusing Democrats of "performative outrage" when they demanded more emergency funding.
As COVID-19 decimates the economy and kills Americans across the nation, McConnell's alliance with Trump is looking riskier. Indeed, some critics argue that McConnell bears a singular responsibility for the country's predicament. They say that he knew from the start that Trump was unequipped to lead in a crisis, but, because the President was beloved by the Republican base, McConnell protected him. He even went so far as to prohibit witnesses at the impeachment trial, thus guaranteeing that the President would remain in office.
Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican political consultant, agrees that McConnell's party deserves a considerable share of the blame for America's COVID-19 disaster. In a forthcoming book, "It Was All a Lie," Stevens writes that, in accommodating Trump and his base, McConnell and other Republicans went along as Party leaders dismantled the country's safety net and ignored experts of all kinds, including scientists. "Mitch is kidding himself if he thinks he'll be remembered for anything other than Trump," he said. "He will be remembered as the Trump facilitator."
The President is vindictive toward Republicans who challenge him, as Mitt Romney can attest. Yet Stevens believes that the conservatives who have acceded to Trump will pay a more lasting price. "Trump was the moral test, and the Republican Party failed," Stevens said. "It's an utter disaster for the long-term fate of the Party. The Party has become an obsession with power without purpose."
Bill Kristol, a formerly stalwart conservative who has become a leading Trump critic, describes McConnell as "a pretty conventional Republican who just decided to go along and get what he could out of Trump." Under McConnell's leadership, the Senate, far from providing a check on the executive branch, has acted as an accelerant. "Demagogues like Trump, if they can get elected, can't really govern unless they have people like McConnell," Kristol said. McConnell has stayed largely silent about the President's lies and inflammatory public remarks, and has propped up the Administration.
John David Dyche, until recently a conservative columnist, wrote that McConnell "of course realizes that Trump is a hideous human being & utterly unfit to be president," and that, in standing by Trump anyway, he has shown that he has "no ideology except his own political power." After the coronavirus shut down most of America, he announced that he was contributing to McConnell's opponent, Amy McGrath, and tweeted, "Those who stick with the hideous, incompetent demagogue endanger the country & will be remembered in history as shameful cowards."
McConnell also appears to have lost the political support of his three daughters. The youngest, Porter, is a progressive activist who is the campaign director for Take On Wall Street, a coalition of labor unions and nonprofit groups which advocates against the "predatory economic power" of "banks and billionaires."
Porter McConnell has also publicly criticized the Senate's confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh, which her father considers one of his greatest achievements. On Twitter, she accused Kavanaugh's supporters of misogyny, and retweeted a post from StandWithBlaseyFord, a Web site supporting Christine Blasey Ford, one of Kavanaugh's accusers. The husband of McConnell's middle daughter, Claire, has also criticized Kavanaugh online, and McConnell's eldest daughter, Eleanor, is a registered Democrat.
When McConnell presided over Trump's impeachment trial, in which the President was accused of trying to extort Ukrainian officials into helping him smear his political rival Joe Biden, he allowed Republican senators to keep insisting that the "real" Ukraine scandal was the Biden family's enrichment from their connections with the country's rulers. Yet McConnell must have known that virtually any criticism one could make about the Biden family could be made as well about McConnel's wife's family. As the Times has documented, McConnell and his in-laws have benefitted from unusual connections in Beijing.
According to "60 Minutes," McConnell and Chao helped another coal company skirt responsibility for one of the biggest environmental disasters in U.S. history. In 2000, in Martin County, Kentucky, a slurry pond owned by Massey Energy burst open, releasing three hundred million gallons of lavalike coal waste that killed more than a million fish and contaminated the water systems of nearly thirty thousand people.
McConnell "made sure the report was essentially suppressed." He noted, "Massey gave a lot of money to McConnell over the years. McConnell's very bright. He took the money and, in return, protected the coal industry. He's truly the most corrupt politician in the U.S." Records show that, between 1990 and 2010, McConnell was the recipient of the second-largest amount of federal campaign donations from people and PACs associated with Massey. And when McConnell ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee it took in five hundred and eighty-four thousand dollars from the coal industry.
Nina McCoy, a retired teacher who lives in Martin County, told me, "Our own senator's wife basically shut down the investigation. Our community from then on knew all those people protected the coal companies instead of us."
Two decades since the Massey slurry-pond disaster, the coal industry has collapsed, barely employing five thousand people statewide, but the region's water remains tainted. McConnell takes credit for recently delivering several million dollars in federal funds to the area for water-infrastructure improvements, but William Brandon Halcomb, a property manager who lives there, told me that the situation is still "horrible." Shortly before we spoke, there had been no water for three weeks. He keeps a bucket tied to a bridge, which he lowers into the creek below when he needs water to flush a toilet. He must drive to another county to buy clean water. "You get a gallon, heat it on the stove, and take a trucker's bath," he said. "A wash-off is all you can do." As COVID-19 spreads, the health hazards posed to Americans who can't reliably wash their hands are obvious. "Why does Kentucky not have clean, reliable water? McConnell could help, but he's in bed with the companies that are causing the problems."
Between 1984, when McConnell was first elected to the Senate, and today, the amount of money spent on federal campaigns has increased at least sixfold, excluding outside spending, more and more of which comes from very rich donors. Influence-peddling has grown from a grubby, shameful business into a multibillion-dollar, high-paying industry. McConnell has led the way in empowering those private interests, and in aligning the Republican Party with them. His staff embodied "the revolving door," as they went from working for one of America's poorest states to lobbying for America's richest corporations, while growing rich themselves and helping fund McConnell's campaigns. Money from the coal industry, tobacco companies, Big Pharma, Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and many other interests flowed into Republican coffers while McConnell blocked federal actions that those interests opposed: climate-change legislation, affordable health care, gun control, and efforts to curb economic inequality.
Under McConnell's leadership, as the Washington Post's Paul Kane wrote recently, the chamber that calls itself the world's greatest deliberative body has become, "by almost every measure," the "least deliberative in the modern era." In 2019, it voted on legislation only a hundred and eight times. In 1999, by contrast, the Senate had three hundred and fifty such votes, and helped pass a hundred and seventy new laws. At the end of 2019, more than two hundred and seventy-five bills, passed by the House of Representatives with bipartisan support, were sitting dormant on McConnell's desk. Among them are bills mandating background checks on gun purchasers and lowering the cost of prescription drugs—ideas that are overwhelmingly popular with the public. But McConnell, currently the top recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has denounced efforts to lower drug costs as "socialist price controls."
Longtime lawmakers in both parties say that the Senate is broken. In February, seventy former senators signed a bipartisan letter decrying the institution for not "fulfilling its constitutional duties." Norman Ornstein, a political scientist specializing in congressional matters at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told me that he has known every Senate Majority Leader in the past fifty years, and that McConnell "will go down in history as one of the most significant people in destroying the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy." He continued, "There isn't anyone remotely close. There's nobody as corrupt, in terms of violating the norms of government."
The most famous example of McConnell's obstructionism was his audacious refusal to allow a hearing on Merrick Garland, whom Obama nominated for the Supreme Court, in 2016. When Justice Antonin Scalia unexpectedly died, vacating the seat, there were three hundred and forty-two days left in Obama's second term. But McConnell argued that "the American people" should decide who should fill the seat in the next election, ignoring the fact that the American people had elected Obama. As a young lawyer, McConnell had argued in an academic journal that politics should play no part in Supreme Court picks; the only thing that mattered was if the nominee was professionally qualified. In 2016, though, he said it made no difference how qualified Garland, a highly respected moderate judge, was. Before then, the Senate had never declined to consider a nominee simply because it was an election year. On the contrary, the Senate had previously confirmed seventeen Supreme Court nominees during election years and rejected two. Nevertheless, McConnell prevailed.
He has since vowed to fill any Supreme Court vacancy that might open this year, no matter how close to the election it is - his corruption and hypocrisy is monumental. McConnell's predecessor as Majority Leader, the retired Democratic senator Harry Reid, of Nevada, accuses McConnell of destroying norms that fostered comity and consensus, such as the restrained use of filibusters. "Mitch and the Republicans are doing all they can to make the Senate irrelevant," Reid told me. "We've watched them stand mute no matter what Trump does. They have lost their souls. From a policy perspective, it's awful. It's hurt the Senate and damaged the country."
he costs of the Senate's dysfunction stretch in all directions, and include America's vulnerability in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak. For seven years after Obama's signature domestic achievement, the Affordable Care Act, passed, in 2010, Republicans in Congress tried at least sixty times to repeal it. In 2017, McConnell, who called it "the worst bill in modern history," led the charge again and, among other things, personally introduced a little-noticed amendment to eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which provided grants to states for detecting and responding to infectious-disease outbreaks, among other things.
Hundreds of health organizations, including the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, sent a letter to McConnell and other congressional leaders, warning them of "dire consequences" if the Prevention Fund was eliminated. Public-health programs dealing with infectious-disease were "critically underfunded." The letter concluded, "Eliminating the Prevention Fund would be disastrous."
In a column in Forbes, Judy Stone, an infectious-disease specialist, asked, "Worried about bird flu coming from Asia? Ebola? Zika? You damn well should be. Monitoring and control will be slashed by the Senate proposal and outbreaks of illness (infectious and other) will undoubtedly worsen." The cuts, she wrote, were "unconscionable—particularly given that the savings will go to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than meeting the basic health needs of the public."
McConnell's attempt to kill the fund was just a small piece of the Republicans' much larger undermining of Obamacare. According to Jeff Levi, a professor of public health at George Washington University, one result of the Republicans' efforts is that many Americans who lack insurance "will likely avoid getting tested and treated for COVID-19, because they fear the costs."
Until recently, McConnell's enabling of Trump has worked well for him, if not for the country. But it has now made him complicit in a crisis whose end is nowhere in sight. As the consequences of the Trump Presidency become lethally clear, his deal looks costlier every day. The trusted Cook Political Report recently downgraded the chances that Republicans would hold their Senate majority to a fifty-fifty tossup, after conservative strategists reported widespread alarm over Trump's handling of the pandemic.
Today Trump's spokesperson denied Trump intends to fire coronavirus expert Anthony Fauci.
We've seen this play out several times in the past - Trump denies wanting to fire an expert and then a few weeks later he fires them.
Fauci committed the fatal error of contradicting Trump by telling the public that it shouldn't be taking hydroxychloroquine willy nilly as it can be fatal and there is no hard science showing it is any help at all with coronavirus.
John Robert doesn't want to risk catching coronavirus -- but he's fine forcing WI voters to risk it said...
Less than a week after a Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court voted along party lines to force in-person voting in the state of Wisconsin, the court has announced that beginning May 4, the court will hear arguments via teleconferencing. The Kansas Supreme Court did the same last week, hearing arguments on the livestream video conferencing platform Zoom.
The Supreme Court decision to hear the arguments online is both the right thing to do and infuriating after their decision last week to side with Wisconsin Republicans, who were refusing requests to delay the April election or extend the absentee mail-in vote deadline.
A whopping 1,287,827 people requested mail-in ballots in Wisconsin. Of those, only 1,003,422 were returned by Wednesday, April 8. As long as ballots were postmarked by April 7, they will still be counted. But 284,000 outstanding ballots is troubling and some voters reported they never received their ballots. Those voters, along with the rest of the electorate, either showed up to vote in person, risking contracting the coronavirus, or they skipped voting all together.
According to Wisconsin Public Radio, 2.1 million voted in Wisconsin's 2016 presidential primary so that means nearly a million had to turn out last week to match the 2016 vote. It is incredibly frustrating the U.S. Supreme Court forced these people to come out in-person to exercise their constitutional right to vote during a pandemic and only days later decided to protect themselves by holding court online.
Senator Susan Collin's approval rating is at 37% - she'll be defeated in the fall.
She sold her soul to Trump for no gain to herself. If she'd stood up to Trump on Kavanaugh and impeachment she'd still have her integrity left. Now she doesn't even have that.
foreign transgenders are running amok on America's blogs, posting lies and propaganda said...
The Justice Department (DOJ) may take action next week against local governments that have cracked down on religious services as widespread parts of the country are shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, a DOJ spokesperson said.
"While social distancing policies are appropriate during this emergency, they must be applied evenhandedly [and] not single out religious [organizations]," DOJ Director of Communications Kerri Kupec tweeted.
During holy week, AG Barr monitored govt regulation of religious services. While social distancing policies are appropriate during this emergency, they must be applied evenhandedly & not single out religious orgs. Expect action from DOJ next week!
The DOJ move would come as some churches are standing up to city governments that have blocked them from holding in-person services during the outbreak -- even in "drive-in" formats that keep people separated and in their own cars.
A judge in Louisville, Ky., on Saturday issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of Mayor Greg Fischer's ban on drive-in church services there.
"The Mayor's decision is stunning," District Judge Justin Walker, a former clerk to the brilliant Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote in a memorandum to the order. "And it is, 'beyond all reason,' unconstitutional."
Freedom of religion is the first of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," its text begins.
Separately, in Greenville, Miss., two churches have said that police came to their drive-in services and threatened to fine worshipers.
"Churches are strongly encouraged to hold services via Facebook Live, Zoom, Free Conference Call, and any and all other social media, streaming and telephonic platforms," Mayor Errick Simmons' office said in an April 7 press release announcing a ban on in-person and drive-in church services.
Attorneys with the Alliance Defending Freedom have filed a lawsuit challenging that order on behalf of the Temple Baptist Church in Greenville.
Kelly Shackelford, president of the First Liberty Institute, argued that the city's order "is just massively unconstitutional."
"It targets churches in a way that it targets no other group," he said. "Cars in parking lots are fine. It's only a crime if the cars in the parking lot are at the church parking lot."
Dictator Trump: I Have "Total Authority" As President
Raw Story reports:
At President Donald Trump's latest White House coronavirus task force briefing, reporters pressed him on his claims that he can reopen the economy, pointing out that the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution clearly leaves the matter to state governments.
Trump's response was to utterly deny this was the case — and to insist that he had the ultimate authority to decide the issue. "When somebody's the president of the United States, the authority is total … and the governors know that," said Trump. "The authority of the president of the United States is total."
Trump says the authority of the president is "total." (Reporter checks US constitution) This is not true. — Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 13, 2020
@kaitlancollins to Trump: "You said when someone is President of the United States, their authority is total. That is not true. Who told you that?" — Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 13, 2020
Trump says his authority is "total." Republicans called Obama a dictator for trying to give Americans healthcare. I wonder how they'll feel about a declaration of "total power" now that the president is a Republican. — Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) April 13, 2020
Trump is asked what provisions in the Constitution give him the right to re-open the country. Trump says "numerous provisions" and offers to provide a list. He doesn't actually name any provisions. The Constitution largely gives states the authority to regulate their own affairs. — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) April 13, 2020
@kaitlancollins tells Trump it's not true that he has "total" authority here. Trump, again not responding directly, says, "We're going to write up papers on this…the governors need us one way or another…" She asks who told him he has total authority. "Enough," he responds.
Ninja0980 said...
Once again,imagine if Obama or Hillary had said this.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "foreign transgenders are running amok on America's blogs, posting lies and propaganda".
I thought you weren't reading or responding to my posts? By all means tell us what lie you think I told and we'll examine it.
The only lies I've seen here have come from you, this one earlier in the thread.
November is coming - demand vote by mail
Amy cuscuriae said...
How the Republican solution is working in one red state...
South Dakota became a covid-19 hot spot after governor resisted issuing stay-at-home order
You can guarantee Biden would have issued a national stay-at-home order by now.
Trump has yet to implement a national testing and tracking system.
People are dying needlessly because of Trump's inaction!
bkmn said...
When the history of this thing is written, we're going to find out that the White House lost critical weeks attacking the virus because everyone around Donald Trump was more concerned with protecting Trump's ego than protecting the American people.
"While social distancing policies are appropriate during this emergency, they must be applied evenhandedly [and] not single out religious [organizations]," DOJ Director of Communications Kerri Kupec tweeted."
Last time I checked, everyone except first responders and food industry workers were told to stay home - there were no mentions of religious qualifiers or disqualifiers at all.
It was only idiot religious people believing they had special privileges -deciding that the rules didn't apply to them. Now that they're the only ones in trouble for disregarding the order that everyone else is following, they're trying to claim "religious persecution."
Well, - in Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" voice - "Isn't that special!"
They're making a convincing case for letting them go ahead with their religious services - but with the stipulation that if they get sick, God should be the only one allowed to cure them.
"Last time I checked, everyone except first responders and food industry workers were told to stay home - there were no mentions of religious qualifiers or disqualifiers at all."
you haven't checked too hard
either that, or your lying
"essential services" around this parts encompass a lot more than first responders and food industry workers
the car wash is open, so are gardening stores, so are CPA firms, so is the liquor store, et al
the list is long of things that could be put off a few weeks
most churches are complying on live meetings but when they conduct a drive-in service and are harassed by law enforcement, why are they less important than a car wash?
during crises, the government overrules civil right for the general welfare
we need to be careful
the government often resists giving the rights back
thankfully, a Dem "progressive" is not in the White House
Warning, Facts Ahead: Trump-Backed [Incumbent] Candidate Loses Wisconsin Supreme Court Race said...
Liberal jurist Jill Karofsky on Monday won a 10-year term on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, a victory Democrats say bodes well for former Vice President Joe Biden's prospects in what is viewed as a top presidential battleground state this November.
The victory, by upward of 120,000 votes as of Monday night, came as a shock to Republicans and Democrats alike in Wisconsin, where contests for president, governor and the state's high court in the last four years have all been decided by about 30,000 votes or less. It followed weeks of Democratic anger over Republicans' insistence on holding elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Wisconsin's map on Monday night looked like a dream general election result for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee — stronger than typical for Democrats in the suburbs and a respectable showing among the state's blue-collar white voters in rural counties.
The challenger for the court seat, Jill Karofsky, ousted the conservative incumbent, Justice Daniel Kelly, in a contest with broad potential implications for voting rights in Wisconsin's November general election. Justice Kelly became just the second incumbent State Supreme Court justice to be ousted at the polls since 1967. President Trump had boasted that his endorsement of Justice Kelly had unnerved Democrats in the state.
Ms. Karofsky's surprise triumph came after Republicans in the State Legislature, and later conservatives on Wisconsin's Supreme Court, rebuffed Democratic efforts to move the date of the elections — held last week but with the results delayed until Monday by a federal judge — or send mail ballots to all voters because of the pandemic.
The decisive Democratic win offered a signal that the party, highly energized and mobilized heading into 2020, could organize and execute a winning get-out-the-vote program against strident Republican efforts to limit voter turnout in a narrowly divided state widely expected to be crucial in this fall's presidential election.
Indeed, senior officials in both parties view Wisconsin as a potential tipping point in a general election between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Good signs for 2020 said...
MORE RESULTS: Both judges appointed by former Gov. Scott Walker -- Judge Paul Dedinsky and Judge Dan Gabler -- lose by at least 20 percentage points.
Maryland - Special Enrollment Periods Extended! said...
The Maryland Health Connection has extended the COVID-19 Special Enrollment Period to June 15 for uninsured Marylanders who need health coverage. In this crisis it is essential that uninsured Marylanders get coverage so that they can get the care they need -- for their safety, and for all of us.
Visit MarylandHealthConnection.gov or download the free "Enroll MHC" mobile app. Request or select "Coronavirus Emergency Special Enrollment Period." Free help is available by calling 1-855-642-8572 from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays.
The deadline has also been extended to July 15 for uninsured tax filers to take advantage of the Easy Enrollment Program by checking the box by on their state tax returns to find out their eligibility for free or low-cost health insurance. Already Marylanders from over 40,000 households have checked the box.
Christopher C. Alberto said...
Christopher C. Alberto
@ChrisAlbertoLaw
Navarro gets slam dunked during 60 Minutes Overtime.
He challenged 60 Minutes' record - "Show me episodes during the Obama and Bush administrations that said the global pandemic was coming, and then you will have some credence in attacking the Trump Administration."
'60 Minutes' rolls out receipts after Trump adviser complains they never covered pandemic warnings
11:45 PM - Apr 12, 2020
Apparently the ability to perform blatant lying is a requirement to be favored by our Presidiot.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "during crises, the government overrules civil right for the general welfare we need to be careful the government often resists giving the rights back"
How hypocritical for a Trump supporter to express concern about the government taking rights away just after Trump's attorney general asked congress to allow Trump to arrest anyone he wants without due process and to detain them indefinitely
How hypocritical for a Trump supporter to express concern about the government taking away rights when Trump has just proclaimed he has absolute power and can do whatever he wants.
How hypocritical for a Trump supporter to express concern about the government taking away rights when a Republican congress announced they wouldn't be impartial jurors in Trump's trial for high crimes and misdemeanors.
I could go on.
For a very long time.
Trump wants to be dictator and Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous are zealots eager to bring that about. They've defended Trump/Republican's every attack on American democracy.
Boreal said...
Breaking: White House insiders suggest Trump refuses corona virus testing because his DNA has been legally requested in his rape cases.
Just imagine the reaction from Republicans if Obama had declared "I have absolute authority, Article II of the constitution says I can do whatever I want.".
They'd have brought up articles of impeachment (and rightly so) on Obama within the hour.
Republicans were calling for Obama's impeachment for wearing a tan suit and using the wrong kind of mustard on his hamburger.
For a couple that claim they're ignoring my posts and that no one reads them Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous sure are obsessed with me - their posts have me in the headline!
If they were ignoring my posts, how could they make the (wrong)judgement that I'm lying?
I'm dedicating this song to you two. It's "Why Can't We Be Friends" by War
transgenders are running amok on the blogs of America spreading lies and propaganda said...
there is now general agreement that we peaked last weekend and the climb of cases is reversing
that means the great respirator shortage, the media said was sure to come, never happened
oh, and the 1.6 million calculation from "Do the Math"?
exposed as alarmist hype
in his defense, it was based on "the math"
but now for the after-math: everyone knows aftermath is a fool
the 240 K estimate of Deborah Birx, the expert, was also wrong
and, yes, China lied to the world, resulting in death and destruction
and, yes, WHO believed every word China said
so did another expert, Tony Fauci
only Trump had the insight to disbelieve the Red Chinese and stop travel
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "only Trump had the insight to disbelieve the Red Chinese and stop travel"
He didn't stop travel, he limited it slightly - Americans were and still are free to fly back and forth to China
He did that the end of January, what did he do for the entire month of february after receiving a dozen or so warnings to take it seriously? Nothing, not a damn thing. He still has yet to issue a national stay-at-home order or to implement national testing and tracking which will be key to restarting the economy without having big rebounds in the pandemic.
Thousands have die needlessly due to Trump's inaction and thousands more will die needlessly because he still refuses to act, to be a leader.
Over 22,000 official deaths and as I posted earlier in the thread the real number of dead from the pandemic is almost certainly over twice that amount.
So, 45,000 have died needlessly due to Trump and thousands more will die because he considers himself a "cheerleader" and "backup" to the states.
As we see yet again, the first thing on Wyatt/Regina's minds when they post is me :)
So much for "I'm ignoring you and no one is reading your posts".
They're afraid to take me on directly so they lob insults from the cheap seats so they can avoid me publicly taking them apart.
Bernie Sanders's 2020 disappointment offers sobering lesson for Trump
When Biden won South Carolina in a landslide thanks to African-Americans, some progressives behaved as though black voters didn't understand their own self-interest. This prompted a scorching, sarcastic public backlash from Michael Harriot, a columnist with the black politics and culture site The Root, aimed right at Sanders supporters. It seemed to confirm they had little in common.
"And now your fragile brittle hearts are broken into a thousand little pieces because black people have rejected the Buddha of Birkenstock-wearers during his quest for the presidency. And by not choosing Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden supporters are somehow ruining America," Harriot seethed in his open letter to so-called Bernie Bros.
This reconsideration of Sanders' success in 2016 — as partly a by-product of the anybody-but-Hillary feeling, and the gender bias that includes — could be bad news for Donald Trump as well, because, obviously, Biden is not Clinton.
Consider Michigan. Clinton lost the state narrowly to Sanders in the 2016 primary and then lost it even more narrowly to Trump later in the general election.
But Michigan apparently likes Biden a lot. He beat Sanders handily there this year. That's a flashing red warning light for Trump, because Michigan remains an important step on his path to a second term.
The Clinton factor
So the story of Sanders now seems, to a greater extent than before, a story about Hillary Clinton. Without Clinton to run against, Sanders wasn't as competitive this year, and without her to run against, Trump might not be, either.
"It was Hillary Clinton at the top of the ticket [in 2016]. Which is sort of sexism on steroids — it's not only that it's a woman, but it's that woman," said Hudak.
"And that was a boost for [Trump in 2016], whether it was in his support or a fall-off in Democratic support, and this year he's not going to have either."
"Anybody that wants a test [for the coronavirus] can get a test." — President Donald Trump, in FAKE remarks to reporters on March 6, 2020 said...
To show that his administration has been fast and effective in its response to the new coronavirus, President Donald Trump claimed that anybody who wants to get tested for the respiratory disease caused by the virus can do so.
"Anybody that wants a test can get a test. That's what the bottom line is," Trump told reporters March 6, 2020 during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Moments later, Trump added that anybody who needs a test gets one.
"But as of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test — that's the important thing — and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right? This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good," Trump said.
HE WAS LYING WHEN HE SAID THAT.
LYING IS RUMP'S M.O.
Glenn E Ross said...
At a time when the country would unite behind even a weak leader, we find ourselves in the unique position of having an anti-leader at the helm.
All the Orange Menace had to do was follow the advice of the experts, let the professionals do their jobs and he probably would have won re-election. It worked for George the Lesser.
People want to unite in a crisis. The best leaders know when to stay out of the way. Unfortunately the deeply damaged Trump has to be the center of attention so badly, that he can't get out of his own way when it would be to his advantage.
Stupidity and Narcissism are a lethal combination.
Trump and Wyatt/Regina are trying to blame the World Health Organization and China for not warning him of the pandemic. That's their excuse for his failure to handle it.
The truth is that Trump was warned, as early as November, ten or 15 times by various medical experts and advisors in his own administration that the pandemic was here and he needed to react quickly and forcefully.
The idea that he would have acted if he had only one more warning is obviously nonsense - after ignoring ten or 15 warnings, one more wasn't going to get Trump to face reality and save lives.
Steven B said...
Trump: "I accept no responsibility."
Also Trump: "I have absolute authority."
You can't have it both ways.
biki said...
And don't forget his non-stop bragging about "only I can't fix this" when he was running for president.
"only Trump had the insight to disbelieve the Red Chinese and stop travel"
Keep hyping that point... and hope that no one will remember that the DNA tests showed that we got infected via folks coming into New York from Europe - not directly from China.
Rump's ban on Chinese folks didn't help much:
The explosion of Covid-19 cases in the New York City area resulted largely from infected patients who flew in from Europe, genome scientists say.
Researchers at NYU Langone Health said they've analyzed 75 samples from patients who were diagnosed with Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at New York-area hospitals last month.
About two-thirds of the samples appear to have European origins, said Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at the medical center. The virus appears to have been imported to New York from the U.K. and several European countries, including France, Austria and the Netherlands, she said.
Genome sequencers are able to roughly correlate how a virus is spreading around the world by examining small mutations in a gene sequence of the pathogen as it's transmitted from person to person. In the case of the coronavirus, whose RNA consists of about 30,000 genetic bases, or letters, it mutates about twice a month.
Those minor mutations tend not to change the potency of the virus. But they provide clues for genetic detectives to chart how they shift subtly over time, allowing them to create sprawling family trees, or phylogenies, that show how the coronavirus has spread from one part of the world or country to the next.
One of the first cases Heguy's team sequenced, collected in early March, came from a Long Island resident with no travel history whose viral genome correlated with a strain circulating in England. That suggested the patient had contact with someone who had brought the virus over from the U.K.
The findings suggest that even after the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions from China, the virus continued to infiltrate the most populous U.S. city via daily flights from Europe.
RUMP'S A DAMN LIAR:
PARAMUS, N.J. — The lines start forming the night before, as people with glassy eyes and violent coughs try to get tested for the virus. In the darkness, they park their cars, cut their engines and try to sleep.
The backlog for coronavirus testing in New Jersey, the state with the second-highest caseload in the country, has been getting worse, not better, officials say.
So far, New Jersey has conducted over 115,000 tests, about one for every 75 residents. Across the river in New York, the epicenter of the crisis, there is about one for every 40. The tests are a critical tool in measuring the disease's spread and a requirement for certain forms of treatment. Yet they remain hard to get, and many are actively discouraged from trying.
"It's unequivocally worsening," Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey said recently, adding, "We've got constraints in the entire food chain."
Initially, the strain came from a lack of test kits, but now there are not enough nasal swabs, not enough nurses. There is a pileup at the labs themselves and a limited supply of the chemicals needed to identify the virus.
Two weeks ago at the Bergen Community College in Paramus, a drive-through testing site in the hardest-hit area of New Jersey, residents had to arrive by 3 a.m. to get a spot. Within days, they were told to show up at 11 p.m. the night before...
The numbers of billionaires pushing for everyone to go back to work early proves one thing and one thing only.
They don't make their money.
You do.
More than 80% of the benefits of a tax change tucked into the coronavirus relief package Congress passed last month will go to those who earn more than $1 million annually.
The provision was inserted into the legislation by Senate Republicans.
foreign transgenders are running amok on America's blogs, spreading lies and propaganda like a virus said...
"Keep hyping that point... and hope that no one will remember that the DNA tests showed that we got infected via folks coming into New York from Europe - not directly from China."
I actually said here weeks ago that Trump's big mistake was not banning European visitors early on
I was actually able to deduce this obvious without the assistance of any study
the Europeans got it in China
the media is latching on to this because of the desperation to blame the virus on Trump, part of an ongoing media hoax
CNN, btw, refused to show Trump's daily conference on Monday because he was attacking CNN for their biased reporting
Anderson Cooper and Jim Acosta had a little mutual admiration society pow-wow instead where one would say something and the other would say "exactly right"
thanks guys, that was thought-provoking "journalism"
"Rump's ban on Chinese folks didn't help much:"
well, according to this study it did, since most of the virus present here didn't come from China
so, not only did the ban on Chinese "folks" help, it was extremely effective
btw, whenever you see TTF refer to someone as "folks", they are implying they are victims of bias
it's dog-whistle to the identity politics gang
I've never seen any sign that Trump is biased against Chinese people
"The numbers of billionaires pushing for everyone to go back to work early proves one thing and one thing only.
You do."
if so, why don't you go make some for yourself?
obviously, the billionaires have made a unique contribution
btw, I've seen plenty of billionaires pushing to keep the lockdown going
richest of all, Bill Gates, says we need 18 months
Joe Biden is such a pig
scores of women have said for years that he was CONSTANTLY PUTTING HIS HANDS ALL OVER THEM
now, a woman has had the courage to come forward and describe in detail how he RAPED HER !!!!!!!
as we know well from TTF's posts during the Kavanaugh hearings, women never lie about that
as the TTFers said, WHY WOULD THEY?
since we know that TTFers and other liberal lunatics are not hypocrites, Sleepy Joe has to go
Bernie, come back
AMERICA NEEDS YOU NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
look at the stats
do the math AND use your brain
of the top ten states in deaths per million
eight are blue states
these governors failed to prepare their states for this pandemic
there will be a huge reckoning with voters in November
Spin spin spin all the lies you want.
We see right through them.
The governors have been clamoring for the feds to do their job while Rump bull shitted just that it would be like a miracle and just disappear.
Come November, we all know who will disappear with all the money he and Jared have bilked us out of.
"...As the dust settles on the $2.2 trillion legislation, it has become clear that one of its largest provisions, a $170 billion tax giveaway, appears to be tailor-made for the benefit of wealthy real estate investors such as President Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is running one of Trump's coronavirus task forces.
The giveaway, primarily to real estate investors and hedge funds, is larger than the total amount in the legislation for hospitals ($100 billion) and for relief for all state and local governments ($150 billion). Worse, the bonanza for these millionaires and billionaires has little to do with the coronavirus: It lets them offset losses not just from 2020 but from 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic..."
Your undying support is for a couple of NEW YORK THUGS
hi, it's Merrick Garland again. Just checking to see if there are openings on the Supreme Court.... said...
"Spin spin spin all the lies you want.
We see right through them."
yes, everyone in the nut house can see straight through the truth and behold the land of fairies and sprites
here's some more "Spin spin spin"
of the 25 states with the lowest deaths per million, only 4 are blue states
face it: state Dems are in trouble in November
liberal lunatics haven't handled the pandemic well
which is the understatement of the year !!!!
Rump beats a quick retreat said...
Trump backs down after Cuomo, other governors unite on coronavirus response
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he's fine with governors making their own decisions about how and when to reopen their states — a quick retreat from the day before, when he insisted that such choices were up to only him because his "authority is total."
Trump's comments in the White House Rose Garden came as states across the Northeast and along the Pacific Coast launched separate regional pacts to plan for how to open up and get their economies going again, forming united political fronts should they need to challenge Trump.
The president said that the administration will provide states with guidelines in the coming days and that he plans to speak soon with all 50 governors via conference call, but he made it clear that the governors can do as they see fit...
Trump caused a stir Monday when he tweeted that it was his decision alone whether to reopen individual states. The assertion was quickly disputed by constitutional scholars, Democrats and some leading Republicans.
At his briefing Monday, Trump said that the president "calls the shots," that governors "can't do anything without the approval of the United States" and that his "authority is total."
The authority to require businesses to close in a public health crisis is known as a "police power," and it is reserved by the Constitution to the states, not the federal government. Because the states and local officials put the shutdowns in place, they will have to be the ones to lift them...
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said earlier Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that Trump would create a "constitutional crisis" if he tried to override any of the governors.
"If he says to me, 'I declare it open,' and that is a public health risk or it's reckless with the welfare of the people of my state, I will oppose it," Cuomo said. "And then we will have a constitutional crisis like you haven't seen in decades, where states tell the federal government, 'We're not going to follow your order.' It would be terrible for this country. It would be terrible for this president.
"We don't have a king — we have a president, and that was a big decision," Cuomo added...
"of the 25 states with the lowest deaths per million, only 4 are blue states"
Let's check back next week, shall we?
South Dakota's [GOP] governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation's largest coronavirus hot spots.
homosexuality is inherently sado-masochistic said...
"Today.
Let's check back next week, shall we?"
just like we're still waiting for that respirator shortage and the hospital bed shortage and 1.6 million deaths and Trump to fire Fauci
most "news" in the MSM are about things "experts" say are going to happen but don't
"South Dakota's [GOP] governor resisted ordering people to stay home. Now it has one of the nation's largest coronavirus hot spots."
media hype
based on a singular outbreak at a meat-packing plant
they've had less than a thousand cases, over a quarter have already recovered, and 6 deaths
NYC would love to be so hot
for that matter, so would Maryland, and most other blue states
https://doh.sd.gov/news/Coronavirus.aspx#SD said...
Every county in South Dakota already has COVID-19 and a total of 988 cases.
https://doh.sd.gov/news/Coronavirus.aspx#SD
On March 23, 2020, there were 349 cases of COVID-19 in Maryland and on March 30, 2020, there were 1.7K cases of COVID-19 in Maryland.
https://coronavirus.maryland.gov
On March 23, 2020, GOP Governor Hogan announced the closure of all non-essential businesses in Maryland when we had 349 cases of COVID-19 in the state.
https://governor.maryland.gov/2020/03/23/governor-hogan-announces-closure-of-all-non-essential-businesses-175-million-relief-package-for-workers-and-small-businesses-affected-by-covid-19/
On March 30, 2020, GOP Governor Hogan issued a stay-at-home order for Maryland when we had 1.7K cases of COVID-19 in the state.
https://dcist.com/story/20/03/30/governor-hogan-issues-shelter-in-place-order-for-maryland
Even with Hogan's orders to close non-essential businesses and to shelter-in-place, there were over 10,000 cases of COVID-19 in MD as of yesterday, April 14, 2020.
South Dakota will show the world what the failure of a governor to order citizens protect themselves from COVID-19 causes.
homosexuality: make no life, make no marriage said...
red states good
blue states bad
SD looks good
MD looks bad
SD didn't shut down
MD did
"South Dakota will show the world what the failure of a governor to order citizens protect themselves from COVID-19 causes."
same old, same old
keep trying to alarm people about a future you have no way of knowing
1.6 million are not dying
there is no respirator shortage
there is no shortage of ICU beds
government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem said...
He was buried, and three days later was raised from the dead, according to Scripture.
They went to church in celebration over this event two millennia later … and were fined $500, according to the authority of the mayor.
The first episode happened in Jerusalem.
The second, Greenville, Miss.
But ancient Rome is gone and this Easter story ends with the federal authorities on the side of the Christians.
The Justice Department intervened on behalf of Temple Baptist Church on Tuesday, filing a statement of interest in a lawsuit against the city.
The church is suing Greenville after police officers walked car-to-car handing out tickets to congregants who refused to leave the parking lot during a drive-in Good Friday service, and the DoJ is siding with the church because "the allegations in the complaint strongly suggest that the city's prohibition of drive-in church services, despite the inclusion of measures to reduce risk such as requiring people to remain in their cars, are neither neutral nor generally applicable."
It is the latest in the delicate balancing of church and state during a pandemic, a consideration of government interest in combating a disease and matters of conscience. The deputy attorney general of the United States said the DoJ would defer to the First Amendment.
"When there is a national crisis, of one kind or another, we don't give up all of our liberties," explained Jeff Rosen. Acts of God, plagues or pandemics or otherwise, require "short-term exigencies as to how expansive they are at a given time, but the Constitution remains in effect at all times."
"Even in times of emergency, when reasonable and temporary restrictions are placed on rights, the First Amendment and federal statutory law prohibit discrimination against religious institutions and religious believers," Barr wrote in a Tuesday statement. "Thus, government may not impose special restrictions on religious activity that do not also apply to similar nonreligious activity."
Several states and other localities took their own actions against churches that met in person despite stay-at-home orders. In Florida, Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister issued a warrant for the arrest of a mega-church pastor who kept church doors open and pews full in defiance of social distancing orders from the state. Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, later issued a directive exempting religious assemblies.
The Kansas Supreme Court upheld an executive order from Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly preventing the gathering of more than 10 people at religious services. Meanwhile, Kentucky's largest city, Louisville, issued an order prohibiting religious services, including drive-in gatherings. A federal court later issued a blistering restraining order against Louisville, ruling that the directive from Democratic Mayor Greg Fischer "criminalized" Easter celebrations.
"Government is clearly overstepping its authority when it singles out churches for punishment, especially in a ridiculous fashion like this," said Ryan Tucker of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing Temple Baptist Church. "In Greenville, you can be in your car at a drive-in restaurant, but you can't be in your car at a drive-in church service. That's not only nonsensical, it's unconstitutional."
Canada is run by a puerile racist who does black-face for entertainment said...
to get around media, Trump will start a daily call-in radio show for Americans to ask him questions directly:
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-pitched-a-radio-show-in-the-situation-room-but-gave-up-because-he-didnt-want-to-compete-with-rush-limbaugh-nyt/
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "scores of women have said for years that he was CONSTANTLY PUTTING HIS HANDS ALL OVER THEM"
And they all said it wasn't a sexual advance, just a clueless man behaving awkwardly
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "now, a woman has had the courage to come forward and describe in detail how he RAPED HER !!!!!!!"
One woman, who's story has repeatedly changed. Even if it were true, one would be morally obligated to vote for Biden as thirty women have come forward saying Trump sexually assaulted/raped them. That's why he won't take a coronavirus test, his DNA is wanted in a rape court case.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "as we know well from TTF's posts during the Kavanaugh hearings, women never lie about that"
Unlike Biden's accuser whose story has changed multiple times, Christine Blasy Ford has been consistent all the way through and Kavanaugh's own calendar from the time corroborates her claims. Like Trump, and unlike Biden, Kavanaugh has many accusers. One woman accusing someone could be a lie, but when there's 20 or 30 accusers its pretty hard to believe in Trump or Kavanaugh's innocence.
"Anybody that wants a test [for the coronavirus] can get a test." — President Donald Trump, in FAKE remarks to reporters on March 6, 2020
It wasn't true then, and its still not true to this day.
Countries that have successfully mitigated this pandemic have implemented nation wide testing and tracking.
The U.S. will need that to start the economy back up without having a resurgence of coronavirus. Trump has done absolutely nothing as a leader - thousands have died because of him and thousands more still will.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "homosexuality is inherently sado-masochistic"
Wow, these two are soooo angry at me, lol
So, Wyatt/Regina, you two say you consider my husband and me a gay couple (I'm a transwoman). We don't do S&M, so you're okay with us being together and getting married then?
I mean, you must be, otherwise it looks like you're blind to good and bad and you're just making that (false) statement to invoke animus against harmless gays and lesbians.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem"
When Republicans say this (its a "dog whistle") what they really mean is that they want to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous have changed their mind. Originally in this thread (or perhaps the last), they didn't defend churches that dangerously remained open, they asserted that party-goers in Jersey were just as bad.
Now from that implicit acknowledgement that churches should be closed for the pandemic, they've done a 180 degree turn and are now absurdly demanding that churches be allowed to endanger the public health by opening during the pandemic.
The truth is that no one ever died from not going to church, but many people will die from going to church during this pandemic.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "to get around media [the truth], Trump will start a daily call-in radio show for Americans to ask him questions directly"
Real presidents don't have time to sit around and B.S. on the radio. Not that Trump hasn't been AWOL during this entire coronavirus epidemic.
Trump's supposed to be working for the country, not campaigning for re-election on a mountain of lies.
JMG said...
The president implied there could be harsh consequences for governors like Cuomo, writing: 'Tell the Democrat Governors that "Mutiny On The Bounty" was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy.'
The president's comments came after Cuomo likened Trump's behavior to that of a king, not a president, in an interview with NBC's Today. Cuomo was responding to Trump's assertion that the president's power is 'total' and 'the governors know that' in regards to opening the economy back up. However, Cuomo disagreed.
Tell the Democrat Governors that "Mutiny On The Bounty" was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 14, 2020
Mutiny on the Bounty was about the ruthless, unjust, tyrannical Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty who shackled his own crew and tortured so many of his own men that they mutinied against him. It's fascinating that Trump sees himself as Captain Bligh. It's quite terrifying as well.
— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) April 14, 2020
You are trying to manipulate governors during a pandemic. Nice.
Desert_Joe said...
If this isn't a clear cut case for the 25th amendment, we might as well not even have a 25th amendment.
F*k you, spineless cowardly Mike Pence and all the rest of the incompetent grovelling toady Cabinet.
Lymis said...
In order to have a mutiny, you have to be under someone's direct authority, and then illegitimately do something against their legitimate orders.
Governors do NOT work for the President. They swore no oath of allegiance to him, so they can't mutiny against him.
DoILookAmused2u? said...
Just so we're clear here, this is a POTUS threatening to harm US States if they try to protect their citizens.
Just imagine if Obama had said "I have TOTAL authority", "I have absolute power over the states".
Just imagine the outrage you'd hear from Republicans if Obama said what Trump did.
Republican hypocrisy is going to allow Trump to become a dictator.
Republicans said Obama was "acting like a dictator" when he wrote a fraction of the number of executive orders that Trump has.
Now where are they when a real dictator threatens the nation?
Gates Rips Trump's "Dangerous" Halt On WHO Funding
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates criticized President Trump's decision to suspend funding to the World Health Organization as "dangerous," saying the payments should continue particularly during the global coronavirus pandemic.
"Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds," Gates tweeted early Wednesday. "Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever."
There are 16 million Americans out of work. With most getting their healthcare through their employer, this is a disaster for the health of these people.
Having health care tied to being employed is a very bad idea.
Americans need single payer health care - where everyone is covered. Only the government can do this.
Did the World Health Organization make the coronavirus pandemic more likely?
Undeniably.
On Tuesday, President Trump criticized the international health agency for "severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," and halted U.S. funding to it.
The president could have added: The World Health Organization has been the Chinese Communist Party's useful idiot.
It has repeated Beijing's claims despite contrary evidence, withholding the information the world needed to stop the virus' rapid spread.
The WHO's actions—or rather inaction—proves its culpability in the coronavirus pandemic.
A new report that demonstrates how the WHO helped disarm the world in the face of a deadly new virus.
Beijing informed the WHO about pneumonia of unknown cause on Dec. 31, and by Jan. 4, the agency was publicly praising China for "responding proactively and rapidly to the current incident in Wuhan."
Yet even at that early stage, the WHO was ignoring warnings that the coronavirus was much more dangerous than Chinese officials admitted.
By the time China contacted the WHO, the coronavirus had already been spreading within the country since at least mid-November, something Beijing has still failed to disclose.
The situation was so serious that Taiwan also notified the WHO about the coronavirus in late December.
Taiwan—which China has blocked from cooperating with the WHO—flagged the reality of human-to-human transmission occurring, meaning the virus had the potential to infect huge numbers of people.
China had already reached the same conclusion, yet destroyed the evidence instead of reporting it.
The WHO completely ignored the Taiwanese warning, choosing to trust Beijing instead.
On Jan. 14, the agency repeated the Chinese assertion that there was no "clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."
It maintained this position until after Jan. 20, when Chinese authorities finally acknowledged that the coronavirus was spreading between humans.
Had the WHO acted earlier, the coronavirus could potentially have been contained in China.
This clear mistake failed to shake the WHO from uncritically accepting China's positions.
Through at least late January, the agency urged other nations to maintain full trade and travel relations with China, heeding Beijing's desire not to isolate the country.
The WHO also downplayed the seriousness of the crisis.
On Jan. 23, the agency's director-general stated the coronavirus was "not yet a global health emergency."
When the agency finally issued such a declaration on Jan. 30, it was after an official WHO visit to Beijing, which led the director-general to laud "China's commitment to transparency and to protecting the world's people."
He also said the WHO "continues to have confidence in China's capacity to control the outbreak," and that China has "set a new standard."
Such flattery ignored the facts and lulled the world into a false sense of security.
But the WHO didn't simply accept China's claims as gospel truth.
Starting in February, the agency went a step further, defending China from deserved criticism.
As Western officials and media outlets began pointing to China's domestic crackdown on information and deceptive health claims, the director-general remarked on Feb. 8 that the WHO wasn't "just battling the virus; we're also battling the trolls and conspiracy theorists that push misinformation and undermine the outbreak response."
A steady stream of similar comments has continued.
Yet the agency has yet to say a word about China's misinformation.
By blindly believing Beijing's claims, the WHO wasted precious days, in which a pandemic went from possible to inevitable.
Even its declaration of a pandemic on March 11 came far too late, when the virus had already spread to 114 countries.
A month later, the WHO still shows no signs of admitting its errors, much less questioning China.
There is no word about the mounting evidence that Beijing continues to falsify its illness and death counts, no suspicion at China's unlikely claims of no new coronavirus cases for days in a row, no criticism of the recent revelations that Chinese officials and state-owned companies plundered global medical supplies in January, even as Beijing covered up the situation at home.
The WHO's silence is perhaps more telling than its continued applause of China's oppressive actions and supposed success.
President Trump pointed out many of the WHO's errors on Tuesday.
The United States should continue to withhold funding from the agency until it is seriously reformed.
At the very least, its leadership should be removed, China should be suspended from full membership, and Taiwan admitted.
That's the minimum needed for the World Health Organization to fulfill its mission rather than being a mouthpiece for Chinese Communist propaganda.
Eric Feigl-Ding said...
New epidemiology estimates that 90% of U.S. death could have been prevented by just acting 2 weeks earlier. The estimated number of deaths falls sharply with earlier interventions - the U.S. delay cost thousands of lives.
South Dakota Cases Soar As Gov Refuses Lockdown
South Dakota's coronavirus cases have begun to soar after its governor steadfastly refused to mandate a quarantine. The number of confirmed cases in the state has risen from 129 to 988 since April 1 — when Gov. Kristi Noem criticized the "draconian measures" of social distancing to stop the spread of the virus in her state.
Noem had criticized the quarantine idea as "herd mentality, not leadership" during a news conference, adding "South Dakota is not New York."
The state now calls home to one of the largest single clusters of coronavirus outbreaks, with 300 workers at a pork-processing plant infected with the deadly bug. The factory, Smithfield Foods, accounts for five percent of the country's pork production and was announced it will be forced to close on Sunday.
The governor will soon find she can't act like nothing is wrong and pretend-away the coronavirus.
Again we see Republican governors refusing to issue life saving stay-at-home orders. Democratic governors put stay-at-home orders in place early on and are seeing the death rates slow a bit. Republican governors in states like Texas and South Dakota have refused to try to mitigate the pandemic in their states and we see the number of cases exploding there.
Trump as a leader should be setting the tone and issuing a national stay-at-home order. Republican states are going to prolong the pandemic and let many die needlessly, as they already have.
"Every county in South Dakota already has COVID-19 and a total of 988 cases."
That was yesterday, April 15, 2020.
Today, April 16, 2020, South Dakota has 1168 cases.
Poll: Don't stop social distancing if coronavirus will spread said...
Only 10 percent of voters surveyed in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll support ending social distancing to stimulate the economy.
President Donald Trump calls it "the biggest decision I'll ever make."
Voters say it's an easy call: Don't reopen the economy if it will enable the coronavirus to spread.
As Trump prepares to restart the nation's economic engine — which was abruptly cut a month ago as the new coronavirus began to spread rapidly throughout the country — a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows the vast majority of voters support continuing the social-distancing measures that appear to be helping the U.S. hamper the rapid spread of Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus.
More than eight in 10 voters, 81 percent, say Americans "should continue to social distance for as long as is needed to curb the spread of coronavirus, even if it means continued damage to the economy." Only 10 percent say Americans "should stop social distancing to stimulate the economy, even if it means increasing the spread of coronavirus." Nine percent of voters have no opinion.
While Democrats (89 percent) are more likely than Republicans (72 percent) to say Americans should continue the "social distancing" measures, large majorities in all demographic groups say it's more important to stop the spread of the virus than to resume economic activity that could undermine those mitigation efforts.
The poll comes as Trump says he is plotting how and when to resume the economic activity paused a month ago, though public-health experts warn that any moves now would be premature. At a briefing at the White House on Tuesday, Trump said the plans to "reopening the country" would be finalized "soon."
"It's going to be very close, maybe even before the date of May 1st … for some states," Trump said Tuesday. "Actually, there are over 20 [states] that are in extremely good shape. And we think we're going to be able to get them open fairly quickly, and then others will follow."...
transgenders are running amok on the blogs of America spreading lies and propaganda, LIKE A VIRUS !... said...
"Only 10 percent of voters surveyed in a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll support ending social distancing to stimulate the economy."
then, wala, looks like the government can stop telling them what to do
they can figure it out themselves
90% will stay safe
individual businesses can decide whether to require masks in their stores
school districts can decide how to protect kids
it's all pretty simple
btw, TTF is an unprecedented disaster
Coverage of the Joe Biden sexual assault allegation definitively shows that the media protect political allies who are accused of sexual assault and attempt to destroy those they perceive as political opponents.
It's nowhere near sufficient to simply note that fact.
They must be forced to change their behavior and amends must begin to be made.
They can start by apologizing to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and removing the "sexual assault" asterisk they constantly put next to his name.
Dozens of thoughtful articles have detailed the major media's shockingly disparate coverage of a sexual assault allegation against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden versus the unsubstantiated allegations against Kavanaugh.
It's a low bar, but the charge against Biden is the stronger of the two.
Unlike the situation with Kavanaugh, Biden's accuser Tara Reade has evidence she at least met her alleged perpetrator.
Even Biden defenders admit that Reade worked for him in 1993.
There remains no evidence Christine Blasey Ford ever even met Brett Kavanaugh, the man she accused of trying to rape and inadvertently kill her in the 1980s.
Also unlike the Kavanaugh situation, Reade has evidence she told multiple people about the alleged assault at the time she claimed it happened and shortly thereafter.
Blasey Ford never tied Kavanaugh to any claim until three decades after the 1980s, and only when he was a nationally known figure being talked about as a potential Supreme Court nominee.
Blasey Ford couldn't get any of her claimed witnesses to back up her story.
That includes her lifelong friend, Leland Keyser, who was pressured by mutual acquaintances to change her story when she said she could not corroborate Blasey Ford's account.
Both men have very good reputations among their female friends, staff, and colleagues, although Biden has also recently been forced to apologize for his well-known handsiness with women in his midst.
Nevertheless, whereas the entire media put all hands on deck to push Blasey Ford's story and help her smooth out its many problems, they more or less had to be dragged kicking and screaming to cover Reade's accusation, finally issuing stories on Easter Sunday after 19 days of steadfastly ignoring the claim.
For the Kavanaugh allegation, the media issued gauzy and hagiographic profiles of Blasey Ford and used the most sympathetic storytelling imaginable to dramatically roll out her allegation.
They made the story massive by publishing as many articles as they could on literally anything that could be spun in Blasey Ford's favor and against Kavanaugh's.
They applied intense public pressure against any Kavanaugh defender.
They had their editorial pages pushing in lockstep for his destruction.
By contrast, the Times and other media outlets are hoping to dispose of the Biden problem with a dry, one-off accounting of Reade's claim.
Whereas the standard employed by the media for Kavanaugh's accuser was "Believe All Women" no matter their lack of evidence (you might recall their many stories explaining the importance of that standard), the standard employed by the media for Biden's accuser is full skepticism.
The New York Times even removed a line noting Biden's history of handsiness with women, and deleted a tweet that said the same, at the request of his campaign. The disparate treatment goes on and on and on.
The situation is so blindingly obvious that one New York Times columnist was forced to confront New York Times editor Dean Baquet about it.
Baquet asserted, implausibly, that Biden wasn't a major news figure and the allegation wasn't a major news story and so, you see, his paper handled both situations properly.
No additional time needs to be spent discussing whether the New York Times and other media outlets were proper or fair. We aren't idiots. Everyone lived through the Kavanaugh coverage knows that the Biden coverage is indefensibly different.
But noting the hypocrisy and corruption is not enough. The following item must be attended to immediately.
That the media couldn't even dream of putting Biden through one thousandth of what they so casually put Kavanaugh through should prick the conscience of everyone who participated in the ghoulish feeding frenzy.
They know how vile it is to ruin someone's reputation without definitive evidence.
True improvement begins with repentance and a willingness to turn away from evil behavior.
What the media did to Kavanaugh was disgusting, and they should apologize
global warming debunked for good said...
only 13 days left
then, everyone will know what a fool "Do the Math" is
he said, if you would please, please, do the math, you'll see that 1.6 million will be dead by May Day
it's just simple math
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!HOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO!!!!!!!! LOL, and hidey, hidey, ho
what a dunce!
do the math, AND use your brain said...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/dow-futures-rally-after-gilead-coronavirus-drug-reportedly-shows-effectiveness/ar-BB12gIs5?ocid=spartandhp
looks like therapeutics are coming
Nearly two-thirds of Americans are concerned social restrictions to combat the coronavirus pandemic will be lifted too quickly, even as President Donald Trump urges the country to get back to normal as soon as possible, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
In a survey of 4,917 U.S. adults on the nonpartisan group's trends panel, Pew found a majority of people from both parties were worried about the duration of measures like stay-at-home orders and social distancing. But 81% of Democrats were more worried that restrictions would be lifted too quickly, as compared with 51% of Republicans who had that concern.
"With substantial limits in place on public activity in most states to combat the coronavirus outbreak, 66% of Americans say they are more concerned that these restrictions will be lifted too quickly, while 32% say they are more concerned they won't be lifted quickly enough," Pew found.
The economy has been devastated since cases of the coronavirus first hit American shores. Around 22 million people have filed for jobless benefits in the past month, by far the worst stretch of job losses in American history.
Many respondents placed some blame on Trump himself for the state of the pandemic in America. 65% said the White House had acted too slowly to take major steps to stop the spread of the virus, although opinions were largely along party lines.
The president has still refused to institute any nationwide stay-at-home orders, leaving that authority to governors.
The survey was conducted between April 7 and 12, but infection rates have only gotten progressively worse over the last week: Cases have continued to spread and more than 662,000 people in the U.S. have now been infected with the coronavirus. More than 28,000 have died, many in New York, an epicenter of the pandemic.
On Thursday, the country saw its worst 24-hour death rate since the outbreak began. 4,591 people died in the country, nearly double the previous single-day record.
"he said, if you would please, please, do the math, you'll see that 1.6 million will be dead by May Day"
You know that's NOT what Do the Math said liar.
It says a lot about your character, and desperation, that your go-to method for arguing is lying and twisting the words that other people wrote so you can knock them down as a straw man argument.
This is the logical fallacy:
"A straw man (or strawman) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man".
Trump says Republicans would 'never' be elected again if it was easier to vote
Tea bags dangling from your MAGA hat do not offer protection from COVID-19 no matter how much you believe it. said...
The second wave of COVID-19 illness hasn't hit yet, but the second generation of T-party protests arrived this week. In Ohio, North Carolina, and Michigan protesters arrived to demonstrate against stay-at-home orders imposed to contain the spread of a virus that has killed over 30,000 Americans since the end of February. More protests are planned.
T-party irregulars might want to use their time at home to broaden their news horizons.
The BBC reports that three months after reporting its first COVID-19 case, Japan is only testing "a tiny percentage" of its citizens, unlike South Korea. And while aggressive contact tracing and isolation worked at first, a second wave of infections is sweeping Japan. The country just declared a nationwide state of emergency until May 6.
Similarly Sweden's controversial decision to refuse coronavirus lockdown measures is taking its toll — with the number of deaths up to 17 times higher than its Nordic neighbors, according to reports.
Fatalities in the Scandinavian nation topped 1,300 on Thursday — far worse than Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all implemented containment measures, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.
By comparison, Denmark has reported 321 COVID-19 deaths, Norway has reported 150 deaths and Finland has reported just 75, the data shows.
"Anybody that wants a test [for the coronavirus] can get a test." — President Donald Trump, in FAKE remarks to reporters on March 6, 2020 said...
Coronavirus clue? Most cases aboard U.S. aircraft carrier are symptom-free
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sweeping testing of the entire crew of the coronavirus-stricken U.S. aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt may have revealed a clue about the pandemic: The majority of the positive cases so far are among sailors who are asymptomatic, officials say.
The possibility that the coronavirus spreads in a mostly stealthy mode among a population of largely young, healthy people showing no symptoms could have major implications for U.S. policy-makers, who are considering how and when to reopen the economy.
It also renews questions about the extent to which U.S. testing of just the people suspected of being infected is actually capturing the spread of the virus in the United States and around the world.
The Navy's testing of the entire 4,800-member crew of the aircraft carrier - which is about 94% complete - was an extraordinary move in a headline-grabbing case that has already led to the firing of the carrier's captain and the resignation of the Navy's top civilian official.
Roughly 60 percent of the over 600 sailors who tested positive so far have not shown symptoms of COVID-19, the potentially lethal respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, the Navy says. The service did not speculate about how many might later develop symptoms or remain asymptomatic.
"With regard to COVID-19, we're learning that stealth in the form of asymptomatic transmission is this adversary's secret power," said Rear Admiral Bruce Gillingham, surgeon general of the Navy.
The figure is higher than the 25% to 50% range offered on April 5 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of President Donald Trump's coronavirus task force.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper, speaking in a television interview on Thursday, said the number of asymptomatic cases from the carrier was "disconcerting."
"It has revealed a new dynamic of this virus: that it can be carried by normal, healthy people who have no idea whatsoever that they are carrying it," Esper told NBC's "Today" morning show.
Such data present challenges to the Pentagon, which is deployed around the world, sometimes in confined environments like submarines, ships and aircraft.
Testing the entire military is not yet feasible, given still-limited testing capacity, officials say, and detecting enough cases without tests is impossible if most cases are asymptomatic.
The U.S. coronavirus death toll - the highest in the world - surged past 31,000 on Thursday after doubling in a week...
The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass.
In March, one of the most feared aspects of the pandemic was the widely reported coming shortage of ventilators.
One well-publicized estimate, repeated by the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, was that the U.S. would need roughly one million ventilators, or more than five times as many as we had.
Gulp.
Ventilators are expensive, they're complex machines, and they can't be churned out in the thousands overnight.
In the state that (as of today) has one-third of the country's confirmed COVID-19 cases, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm for ventilators repeatedly.
On March 27, he acknowledged "I don't have a crystal ball" but said his state desperately needed 30,000 ventilators, maybe 40,000, but had only 12,000.
When President Trump noted that Cuomo's state had thousands of unused ventilators it hadn't even placed yet, Cuomo admitted this was true but said he still needed more: "Yes, they're in a stockpile because that's where they're supposed to be because we don't need them yet. We need them for the apex," Cuomo said at the time.
On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days "at the current burn rate."
But on April 6, Cuomo noted, "We're ok, and we have some in reserve."
Now New York appears to have passed the apex.
Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6.
Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6.
Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away: On April 15, he said he was sending 100 of them to Michigan and 50 to Maryland. On April 16, he announced he was sending 100 to New Jersey.
New Jersey has by far the most cases outside of New York, with 75,000 positive tests. It also has by far the most deaths outside of New York: 3,518 as of April 16. However, New Jersey, with 8,011 total hospitalizations as of April 16, also has more ventilators than it is currently using and also may have passed its apex; as of April 16, the fewest New Jerseyans were on ventilators since April 8. So far, the peak was April 14, when 1705 patients were on ventilators. Yet before Cuomo's announcement, New Jersey reported that 46 percent of its ventilators were still available.
Michigan, the fifth-hardest-hit state after Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, may or may not have had its worst day. So far its worst daily death toll was 205 on April 10, but its second-highest total was 172 on April 16. The number of new cases reported fell slightly from a peak on April 14. But Michigan isn't even using most of its ventilators yet: As of April 16, it reported 1,232 ventilators were being used but 1,754 more were available. So New York's surplus is at the moment adding to the Michigan surplus.
Maryland, which was sent 50 ventilators by California recently before Cuomo offered to send them 50 more, appears to be right around its apex; deaths hit a record high of 47 on April 15, then dropped slightly each of the next two days. I couldn't find any stats about ventilators on the state's COVID-19 website. The state's largest paper, the Baltimore Sun, appears not to have run any pieces discussing feared ventilator shortages since late March. On March 25, Gov. Larry Hogan said the state had received a shipment of FEMA ventilators and said it was "not enough" without divulging numbers. Hogan appears not to have said anything about ventilators lately except for last Sunday, when he said President Trump was "not quite accurate" when he claimed governors were in good shape regarding medical equipment. "Everybody still has tremendous needs on personal protective equipment and ventilators and all of these things that you keep hearing about," Hogan said, without being specific
remember Brett Kavanaugh? he was the final nail in the gay agenda's coffin said...
"The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass."
there was never any risk of a shortage
the main-stream media, slavishly supported by their by myriad evil sycophant blogs like TTF and Russian hackers and foreign transgenders, promoted this hoax to panic Americans for political purposes
Don't listen to their words, look at what they do said...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is struggling to test enough people to track and control the spread of the novel coronavirus, a crucial first step to reopening parts of the economy, which President Donald Trump is pushing to do by May 1.
Trump on Thursday released a plan to ease business restriction that hinges on a downward trajectory of positive tests.
But more than a month after he declared, "Anybody who wants a test, can get a test," the reality has been much different. People report being unable to get tested. Labs and public officials say critical supply shortages are making it impossible to increase testing to the levels experts say is necessary to keep the virus in check.
"There are places that have enough test swabs, but not enough workers to administer them. There are places that are limiting tests because of the CDC criteria on who should get tested," said Dr. Megan Ranney an emergency doctor and associate professor at Brown University. "There's just so many inefficiencies and problems with the way that testing currently happens across this country."
Trump's plan envisions setting up "sentinel surveillance sites" that would screen people without symptoms in locations that serve older people or minority populations. Experts say testing would have to increase as much as threefold to be effective.
The plan pushes responsibility for testing onto states.
"You know, the federal government shouldn't be forced to go and do everything," Trump told reporters Thursday.
But state and local officials as well as lab managers say they cannot expand testing until there are more supplies.
This week governors, physician groups and laboratory directors called on the Trump administration to address shortages of swabs, protective gear and highly specialized laboratory chemicals needed to analyze the virus' genetic material. Hospitals and state health departments report scouring the globe to secure orders, competing against each other and their peers abroad in a system that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., described as "mayhem."
"The federal government cannot wipe their hands of this and say, 'Oh, the states are responsible for testing,'" Cuomo said Friday as he complained of a shortage of chemicals manufactured in China. "I don't do China relations. I don't do international supply chain."...
Trump has denied that the U.S. has fallen short, asserting that the U.S. has the "most expansive and accurate testing system anywhere in the world." Only in recent days has the U.S. surpassed the rate of testing in South Korea, which has conducted about one test for every 100 people. Vice President Mike Pence told reporters Monday that if governors "would simply activate" underused high-capacity testing machines, "we could double the amount of testing in the U.S. literally overnight."
"That is not the experience in Rhode Island," said Gov. Gina Raimondo, D-R.I.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas, whose state has one of the lowest per capita testing rates in the country, told CNN it has been difficult to get testing supplies. Gov. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., a Trump ally, said testing needs to be stepped up before he can lift restrictions.
Jennifer Rodriguez, a pharmacy technician at a major retail chain in California, said she was sent home by her employer last week after coming down with symptoms. Her company would not test her, and she spent hours on the phone trying to find a place that would, she said.
The San Luis Obispo County health department can only test 50 samples per day, and a spokeswoman said those tests are reserved for people who are hospitalized, first responders and those who have had contact with people who tested positive. Rodriguez didn't qualify. Another clinic told her she might have to pay $150 if it determined she did not fit its test criteria.
"I just feel like medical workers, or even people on the front line, they should have some kind of priority," said Rodriguez.
For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up in two to three weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including pneumonia, and death.
Lab officials and health expert told The Associated Press that supply shortages have prompted them to limit who can be tested. That can leave out people who have symptoms but aren't sick enough to be hospitalized, or people who have no symptoms and might unwittingly spread the virus. Experts say it will be crucial to test those people if the economy is to reopen.
Ed Thornborrow, medical director of the University of California at San Francisco Clinical Microbiology Laboratory, said he wants to run 3,000 tests per day, but he can only do 100 to 250 now because he lacks enough nasal swabs. He works constantly to find more.
"That's what I spend most of my time on these days," he said.
Meghan Delaney, chief of pathology and lab medicine at Children's National Hospital in Washington, says shortages of chemicals known as reagents are constraining how many tests her lab can perform.
Vendors, in response, are restricting what hospitals can buy, said Dr. Robin Patel of the Mayo Clinic's infectious disease laboratory.
"It's a little bit like rationing," Patel said.
In early March, Trump announced a plan for nationwide testing via drive-thru sites at chains such as Walmart and Target, linked by a Google-affiliated website. Six weeks later, the website is a pilot program available in just four California counties. Few of the retailers' sites have opened, and executives from companies including Walgreens have said they are waiting for direction from the federal government...
Don't listen to their words, look at what they doTrump also has promoted a 15-minute test developed by Abbott Laboratories as a "game changer." Federal officials initially distributed 15 machines to public health labs in each of the 50 states and U.S. territories, along with 250 to the Indian Health Service. Alaska received 50. But governors say they didn't get enough cartridges needed to run large numbers of the Abbott tests. Rhode Island received only 120, much fewer than they were promised. Raimondo said when the state tried to get more, Abbott and others that make the test cartridges directed her to the federal government, which in turn told her to go directly to the companies. The state has now received 850 tests, far fewer than it requested, Raimondo said Friday. Federal health officials declined to say how many cartridges were initially sent to states, but said more will be available as Abbott increases production. The company says it is currently producing 50,000 cartridges daily. The U.S. bungled its initial rollout due to flaws with the test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Precious time was wasted in February as the test was corrected and redistributed. Private labs at hospitals, universities and commercial companies weren't fully enlisted in the effort until March. The U.S. is currently testing roughly 145,000 people daily, for a total of 3.4 million results reported, according to state data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project. Public health experts say capacity needs to be much higher, in part to repeatedly test essential workers and to isolate those who test positive and to track down their close contacts to prevent new outbreaks. "We still probably need to be doing three times more testing than we're doing now," said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard. "I don't see America getting by anytime soon with 100,000 to 150,000 tests." said...
Trump also has promoted a 15-minute test developed by Abbott Laboratories as a "game changer." Federal officials initially distributed 15 machines to public health labs in each of the 50 states and U.S. territories, along with 250 to the Indian Health Service. Alaska received 50.
But governors say they didn't get enough cartridges needed to run large numbers of the Abbott tests.
Rhode Island received only 120, much fewer than they were promised. Raimondo said when the state tried to get more, Abbott and others that make the test cartridges directed her to the federal government, which in turn told her to go directly to the companies. The state has now received 850 tests, far fewer than it requested, Raimondo said Friday.
Federal health officials declined to say how many cartridges were initially sent to states, but said more will be available as Abbott increases production. The company says it is currently producing 50,000 cartridges daily.
The U.S. bungled its initial rollout due to flaws with the test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Precious time was wasted in February as the test was corrected and redistributed. Private labs at hospitals, universities and commercial companies weren't fully enlisted in the effort until March.
The U.S. is currently testing roughly 145,000 people daily, for a total of 3.4 million results reported, according to state data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project. Public health experts say capacity needs to be much higher, in part to repeatedly test essential workers and to isolate those who test positive and to track down their close contacts to prevent new outbreaks.
"We still probably need to be doing three times more testing than we're doing now," said Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard. "I don't see America getting by anytime soon with 100,000 to 150,000 tests."
hi, rememba me?, it's Merrick Garland again. just checking to see if there are any openings on the Supreme Court said...
"But more than a month after he declared, "Anybody who wants a test, can get a test," the reality has been much different."
we had a lot fewer cases then and anyone who reasonably needed a test could get one
anyone with any intelligence, which, of course, rules out the main-stream media, who are slavishly supported by their by myriad evil sycophant blogs like TTF and Russian hackers and foreign transgenders, knew then we did't have enough to test every citizen of the US daily
one of the big problems right now is that the test requires a re-agent that is mainly produced in China
after this is over, the world needs to eliminate its dependence on China until the Orwellian regime is replaced
pick either door 1, door, 2, or door 3 said...
"A key coronavirus model has lowered its estimate of total U.S. deaths in its latest projection of how many will die due to the contagious virus.
The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) lowered its projection of total deaths from 68,841 to 60,308.
The institute said that change was partially driven by both lower projections in states besides NY and NJ, like Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia and Florida.
The projection is significantly lower than prior estimates from the IHME, which last month was predicting 84,000 deaths from the virus."
Hey, wait a minute here.
"Those supportive of such modeling say that it is not a crystal ball, but a snapshot of a situation based on the data and facts available at the time. As those facts change, so do the models. Since those 84,000 estimates, more states have implemented sweeping social distancing and lockdown measures in an effort to slow the spread of infections. Revising models show that those strategies are working, they say."
Hey, I told that to "Do the Math", and his response, just last week, was that the best data projected 1.6 million deaths by May Day. Here, these experts said that last month they were projecting 84K.
The question remains: was "Do the Math" ignorant or is he an imbecile or was he lying?
Obama may be the sleaziest President ever said...
more about how the Obama FBI was violating constitutional protections to stop Trump's campaign:
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-collected-improper-cell-phone-pictures-while-spying
Do the Math said...
"Hey, I told that to "Do the Math", and his response, just last week, was that the best data projected 1.6 million deaths by May Day. Here, these experts said that last month they were projecting 84K.
The question remains: was "Do the Math" ignorant or is he an imbecile or was he lying?"
You are still twisting my words to fit your own twisted agenda.
It was clearly explained that the regression analysis only looked at the existing death numbers, and did NOT account for any other effects. At the time the analysis was done, there was only a very small dip in the evidence in the death numbers that mitigation methods had started to take effect.
The original post showed the regression analysis for two cases - one which used nearly all of the data up to that date, and another that used less date (starting at a later date) to see what effect that small dip would have in the final numbers.
The first case showed 6.4 million, and the second case showed 1.6 million - showing a 4 to 1 variation in the outcome depending on which subset of the data was fit. The best curve fit was exponential, each with correlation coefficients greater than 0.99 (a perfect fit is 1.0). This data clearly showed the exponential growth rates of the virus and the potential damage that could be done if major mitigation efforts weren't implemented quickly and effectively.
Due to an inexcusable lack of testing that still persists in the US, it was unknown what percentage of the "new cases" data represented of the real infection rate. If it was only 10%, the exponential growth in the death rates could be expected to continue, because mitigation would have been too late to help. If it represented a much higher percentage, say 80 to 90%, than there would be reason to be hopeful.
But that was data that was unavailable at the time, and frankly it still is because there still hasn't been enough testing. Knowing how many people are dead vs alive however is a much easier test, and does not require specialized equipment, training, tests, or reagents from China.
The clearest evidence we have that social distancing is working is the fact that we do *NOT* still have exponential growth in the death numbers - it appears to be linear now, with roughly 2000 additional deaths each day. This is of course wonderful news, as clearly, things could have gone a lot worse.
The analysis was very simple and explicitly avoided the use of data subject to large unknowns (like infection rates), and was specifically and deliberately referred to as regression analysis of the death data - NOT a model, or as a "promise" as you tried to twist it into.
You also conveniently ignore this line from the original post:
"Our best hope is that the small dip that has occured in the past 3 days means we are reaching the peak for the US. If that is the case, then we can look forward to the deaths being a lot lower."
It turns out those last 3 data points WERE the start of the turn-around, and the number of deaths ARE a lot lower. But the last 3 data points out of 27 aren't enough to predict a trend on, and I never attempted to.
Just because you keep trying to twist my analysis into something to berate me with doesn't mean I'm an imbecile or lying.
But I know that won't stop you from tying. But please do keep it up. I find your desperate flailing to slander "liberals" amusing.
Typo correction - "But I know that won't keep you from TRYING."
""But more than a month after he declared, "Anybody who wants a test, can get a test," the reality has been much different."
we had a lot fewer cases then and anyone who reasonably needed a test could get one"
Confused troll - call your doctor and say "I want a COVID-19 test" and let us know what state you're in and what you are told about getting that test. Simply wanting a test will not necessarily get you one. The president you adore so much lied to all of us when he us told us "anybody who wants a test can get it." He didn't say "anyone who reasonably needed a test," that's your spin and a misquote.
You might recall how much you bitched about Obama telling us we could keep our doctor if we wanted.
Your misquoting spin about Rump's false promise shows your true colors.
You are tediously boring, or to use your words "ignorant...imbecile...lying"
Here's an interesting graph comparing actual facts about Rump and Obama's approval ratings: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_vs_president_obama_job_approval.html
Black line= Rump Approval
Gray line = Obama Approval
It's clear as day, Obama's approval ratings are higher than Rump's, contrary to the troll's mistaken beliefs.
Obama abused the IRS to win the election in 2012, and tried to use the FBI in 2016 to attack an opponent - sleaziest Prez ever said...
"But I know that won't stop you from tying. But please do keep it up. I find your desperate flailing to slander "liberals" amusing."
OK, I'll keep tying, LOL!
the analysis was obviously invalid because of changed circumstances and your posting was a malicious attempt to incite panic
"Simply wanting a test will not necessarily get you one."
well, yes, but that was obvious at the time
he misspoke, big deal
he said it once
were you relying on it?
of course, not
"The president you adore so much"
I don't have a high opinion of him at all
but compared to the Dems in Washington, he's wonderful
"You might recall how much you bitched about Obama telling us we could keep our doctor if we wanted."
uh, Obama lie was believed by many and a factor in enacting the unprecedented disaster called Obamacare
"You are tediously boring, or to use your words "ignorant...imbecile...lying""
you don't see me misusing data to cause panic like the ignorant, imbecilic, lying "Do the Math"
"the analysis was obviously invalid because of changed circumstances and your posting was a malicious attempt to incite panic"
Right... because there's nothing more scary than math - especially regression analysis.
The limits of the analysis were obvious, I showed where the data came from, and included the actual numbers and equations so you could check them yourself. You didn't. There is nothing invalid about the math. At the time of the original post it wasn't clear if the mitigation effects showing up in the data and I said so.
It clearly showed how rapidly the virus could cause damage, and hopefully, it encouraged people to take stay at home orders, social distancing, masks, gloves, and other mitigation efforts seriously... unlike the idiots who are out now in various states protesting. Unfortunately, they are likely to make the health and economic problems of this outbreak last longer. Perhaps if they'd been shown the math, they might take it more seriously.
After doing the analysis myself, I was one of the first people to show up at our local grocery store with mask, hat, and gloves. Now nearly everyone has masks, and some people have gloves. I was also early in keeping my elderly relative at home except for doctor visits. It's a tragedy that the mitigation efforts didn't start sooner. Thousands of lives - literally - could have been spared.
Your charge of "a malicious attempt to incite panic" is ridiculous. If I wanted to do that, all I'd have to say is that there are a bunch of transwomen in Montgomery County trying to use the ladies' restrooms.
We could then watch all the pearl-clutching church ladies cry about how unsafe they are and how dangerous those "men pretending to be women" are.
This pandemic has shown that it is more dangerous for many women to stay home than it is for them to go out. If there's maliciousness around, it is in the very homes that women are trying to take shelter in:
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/13/coronavirus-lockdown-domestic-violence/
TO SAY THAT we have seen a spike in domestic violence during the coronavirus pandemic would be an understatement. In the weeks since populations worldwide have been directed to "stay home" to prevent the virus's spread, cases of domestic violence have surged — and that's reported cases. This should come as no surprise: Women — and it is predominantly women who are victimized — are confined to isolated homes with abusive partners whose coercive and physically violent tendencies are enabled and further inflamed by economic stressors. Supportive community ties are severed, while emergency services, shelter systems, and social services are overwhelmed and congenitally underfunded.
According to statistics released by the United Nations, reports of domestic violence in France increased 30 percent following the country's lockdown on March 17; during the first two weeks of lockdowns in Spain, the emergency number for domestic violence received 18 percent more calls; and help lines in Singapore have received 30 percent more calls. As NBC News reported, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have seen domestic violence cases rise up to 35 percent in recent weeks.
America, land of the free, home of the stupid said...
Conspiracy theory website Infowars convinced hundreds of people to gather in close proximity in Austin, Texas, on Saturday at a rally to protest business closures caused by a global pandemic that has killed thousands of Americans.
Infowars talk show host Owen Shroyer organized the rally, called "You Can't Close America," after threatening earlier this month to mobilize his gullible audience into defying common sense social distancing orders.
"Reopen the economy next week, reopen everything next week, or I really might come on here just start calling for revolting against this."
He made good on that threat when hundreds of his listeners showed up at the state capitol Saturday demanding that businesses that have been closed be allowed to reopen immediately.
Protestors carried signs in support of President Donald Trump, who has done little to convince his base to stop protesting stay-at-home orders. In Michigan earlier this week, hundreds of anti-safety protestors blocked streets in defiance of an executive order from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) to shelter in place. Trump responded by calling for a mutiny against state governments on Twitter.
"LIBERATE MINNESOTA!" "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!" "LIBERATE VIRGINIA," Trump said in a Friday tweet-storm.
White House adviser Stephen Moore insisted that those protesting for the economy to reopen are "modern-day Rosa Parks" (they are not).
At the Austin protest, crowds chanted "Fire Fauci!" — referring to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert who has urged caution against immediately reopening businesses.
lex Jones, the proprietor of Infowars, also attended. Jones and Shroyer are both being sued for defamation for repeatedly and falsely claiming that the shooting at Sandy Hook in 2012 never happened and that the parents of dead children are "crisis actors." The rally also featured trademark Infowars propaganda, including signs denouncing vaccines.
Maybe these people should do some math.
"Maybe these people should do some math."
Maybe you should do some reading of the Constitution. The citizens have a right to petition the government for the redress of grievances. People are allowed outside to do essential things like exercise, and shop for food. Democracy is just as essential.
There is room to discuss safe ways to reopen. Fauci seems like an alright guy to me but no one elected him to anything.
government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem said...
HBO's Bill Maher calls on the news media to calm down and give a proper perspective to their coverage of COVID-19.
"Now that we're starting to see some hope in all this, don't hope-shame me," the "Real Time" host said. "You know, the problem with nonstop gloom and doom is it gives Trump the chance to play the optimist, and optimists tend to win American elections."
"FDR said, 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' You know, as full of s–t as he is, I could see Trump riding that into a second term."
"So, look, if this insanity happens again, news sources have to rein it in. Everyone knows Corona is no walk in the park. Because you literally can't walk in the park. But at some point, the daily drumbeat of depression and terror veers into panic porn," he added. "Enough with the 'life will never be the same' headlines. ... Everything looks scary when you magnified it a thousand times."
"Giving the proper perspective isn't a cover-up of the truth. It is the truth... We need the news to calm down and treat us like adults... Trump calls you fake news. Don't make him be right."
Everyone is aware we have a Constitution. No one is talking about rescinding it.
And frankly, I don't mind a bunch of conservative idiots risking their lives for a stupid protest. Having fewer idiots around is always a good idea.
The problem is that if any of them get really sick, they are a risk to other people in our community - not the least of which are health care workers who are already in enough danger.
"compared to the Dems in Washington, he's wonderful" said...
Here's Mr. Wonderful on himself yesterday while he was supposed to be telling us about COVID-19:
Aaron Rupar✔
@atrupar
"It could have been billions of people if we had not done what we did" -- Trump absurdly claims that his move to restrict travel from China saved a billion or more lives
Embedded CSPAN video
6:00 PM - Apr 18, 2020
That's your stable genius talking about the lives he imagines he saved but didn't.
Delusional.
as I said, I'd prefer someone else
just that no Democrats come to mind who would be an unacceptable alternative
many more Americans would have died if Biden had been President
studies show that the virus infections we've experienced mainly came from Europe rather than China
Trump stopped that whole wave coming directly from China
Biden called it xenophobic fear-mongering
the lesson: when something likes this starts, close all borders immediately
and don't elect Dems
btw, in addition to the foreign transgender troll, we now have a blatant enemy of America posting: his name is "America, land of the free, home of the stupid"
just when you thought the panic pusher "Do the Math" was as bad as it gets
Ruth Bader might as well retire, she has no influence.....hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!! said...
Last fall, as the House impeachment wave was building, I asked a gathering of 10 friends what they thought of President Trump's prospects. Only six were Trump voters in 2016, but the group was unanimous on two points: The president would not be convicted by the Senate and would be re-elected in 2020.
Because the world has been turned upside down since then, I wanted an update from the same group. All successful New Yorkers, they are active in business, philanthropy and politically astute.
Like everyone else, they recoil at the deaths engulfing the nation and our city, and are horrified by the economic destruction being imposed in a bid to save lives. They worry about their own health, their families, friends and neighbors.
Although they hardly represent a scientific sampling, their views on the president, his handling of the epidemic and the fall election are not markedly different from public polls. In general, the group's opinion of Trump's leadership is good news for the president.
He's picked up at least one new voter — a woman who says Trump has been a much better president than she expected. So far, he hasn't lost any supporters, though one unhappy backer says he is open to voting for Joe Biden, depending on Biden's choice of a running mate.
Although several in the group express uncertainty about whether Trump will win a second term because of the coronavirus and economic impact, not a single one is convinced the president will lose, largely because they all see Biden as weak and in obvious decline. Even those who reflexively back Democrats doubt that Biden can win.
Yet when I asked all 10 to grade Trump's performance, there was a wide range of assessments and even his supporters were not always happy. Only three give him an "A," with two citing his success in getting the private sector involved in producing equipment for front-line health workers while also spurring the government bureaucracy to speed its approvals and trim regulations.
More typical was the response from one avid female supporter: "I approve of what he gets accomplished and I disapprove of what he says and how!" She gives him a "B" on substance and a "D" on conduct, adding that "arrogance is never appealing."
Similarly, a man who backed Trump in 2016 gives him an "85 percent on substance, barely a passing grade on the rest of it," meaning the Twitter feuds and atmospherics surrounding his daily briefings. "Trump should shut up and let his team do more of the talking," he said.
Another strong supporter gives Trump a "B" on overall performance, calling him a "mercurial polarizer" but adding that "I don't believe voters will blame him for the disease."
The man open to switching to Biden gives Trump a "D" on everything. He cites the president's early false assurances that "we have the virus under control" and the exhausting controversies over whether Dr. Anthony Fauci would be fired.
My view is that the president, like virtually everyone else in Washington, including Democrats, the media and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was slow off the mark and initially reluctant to see the virus as a major threat. But once Trump crossed that threshold, he became, as he put it, a "wartime president" and has performed very well at marshaling supplies, working cooperatively with private firms and states facing the biggest outbreaks and keeping the public informed.
Although his rhetoric can be absolutist, Trump has been flexible when it was needed and his deference to medical and health professionals is refreshingly out of character.
So I would give Trump an "A" — except for the theatrics of the daily briefings. They are far too long, some lasting two hours, and too much time is wasted arguing with the media.
While it's obvious much of the White House press corps, led by the disgraceful Jim Acosta of CNN, personally hate Trump and are looking for a fight, the president errs by giving them one on a nearly daily basis.
He seems not to realize the noisy squabbles drown out his attempt to assure the public that the government is making progress. He is also too quick to throw down with Democrats, undermining his calls for national unity and sacrifice. An occasional turn of the other cheek would set an example for the political class and the media that the crisis requires all of us to change our habits.
Because I want a tighter focus, more light and less heat, my grade drops to a "B." Good first steps would be limiting the number of media questions and breaking up the Washington monopoly by letting regional news outlets participate.
As for the campaign, one of the three people giving Trump an "A" on the epidemic makes a strong case for his reelection based on how the event has clarified many divisive issues — to the president's advantage.
"He's been proven right about so many things," my friend says. "Stopping illegal immigration is no longer debatable. His trade dispute with China makes even more sense because of how the Communist Party deceived the world. The need to cut regulations is more obvious and putting America First is no longer a question."
He also believes Democrats will be on defense because the shutdowns in New York, Illinois and California are going to wreck their economies and lead to tax hikes in what already are the highest-taxed states. He envisions more "Tea Party"-like protests of the kind taking place in Michigan against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's erratic shutdown rules.
Still, he has a warning for Trump. "There's only one thing out there, and if he gives them the ammunition, shame on him. If he overpromises on the economy coming back quickly and it doesn't, he'll pay the price in November."
by the end of Pence's 2nd term, every judge in America will believe in the Constitution said...
"Everyone is aware we have a Constitution."
oh good, it sounded like you thought governors had the power to ban protest
whew, glad we got that settled
"No one is talking about rescinding it."
sure, what would be the point when liberal activist judges ignore it anyway?
"And frankly, I don't mind a bunch of conservative idiots risking their lives for a stupid protest. Having fewer idiots around is always a good idea."
oh, OK, it sounded like you minded but I guess you're just not good at expressing yourself
"The problem is that if any of them get really sick, they are a risk to other people in our community - not the least of which are health care workers who are already in enough danger."
kind of like when you hang out hours at the grocery store, the liquor store, the hardware store, et al, every day
democracy has its risks
calling on socialists to unite and stop the bourgeois Biden said...
Mary Shippee voted for Senator Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin's Democratic primary this month, well after it was clear he had no chance to become the party's presidential nominee.
Now that Mr. Sanders has dropped out and endorsed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Shippee is torn over whether to once again cast a vote for a moderate Democrat in November, after grudgingly supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Barack Obama in 2012.
"What it feels like is the Democratic Party relies on guilting progressives into voting for them, and they don't want to have any meaningful changes," said Ms. Shippee, 31, a nursing student in Milwaukee. "For the third election in a row, to have a candidate you're not excited about makes me a little more interested in voting third party."
Despite Mr. Sanders's call to unite behind Mr. Biden to defeat President Trump — whom the Vermont senator described as "the most dangerous president" of modern times — and despite Mr. Obama's assurance that the party had moved left since he left office, the youthful and impassioned army of Sanders supporters is far from ready to embrace a nominee so unlike the one they pinned their dreams on.
"oh, OK, it sounded like you minded but I guess you're just not good at expressing yourself"
I'm fine at expressing myself. I even know how to use periods on sentences, and complete paragraphs to better explain a complicated topic.
The problem, as your posts elucidate, is that your brain can only process, at best, one sentence at a time - whether it originates from the original poster or from the 2lbs of fatty Jell-O between your ears.
While this makes it convenient for you to take concepts out of context and twist them around to suit your own malicious purposes, it doesn't make for convincing arguments - unless of course you've already drunk the Conservative Kool-Aid.
The Rumpster needs your help. He needs you to go out to large MAGA rallies and show your support and how many people want him to be president again. The more rallies you go to, the more likely it is that he'll be re-elected. Exercise your freedom! Go to as many churches as you can! Show those libs how stupid they are for their "politically correct" social distancing!
Without your ubiquitous, open and visible help, he will never get elected again! Go out and save America!
Government isn't the problem, Conservatives are the problem said...
As if protesting weren't stupid enough, now conservatives are actively trying to kill people by stopping their access to medical services. I don't know about you, but I'd call that "deplorable."
The "Operation Gridlock" event hosted by the Michigan Conservative Coalition in Lansing on Thursday drew thousands of people to the state capital Lansing to protest the state's strict stay-at-home quarantine order.
As conservative demonstrators brought Michigan's capital to a standstill on Wednesday with 'Operation Gridlock', their planned drive-by protest caused ambulances to get stuck in traffic.
Downtown Lansing was clogged with the vehicles of protesters against Governor Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
Lansing Police struggled to keep traffic flowing and hospital security tried to keep entrances clear for emergency vehicles.
At one point an ambulance had to turn down a one-way street to get out of the gridlock. Most reports focused on traffic limiting access to Sparrow Hospital, with medical staff inside voicing their frustration at the protest.
"To see this - traffic blocking the main intersection of a level 1 trauma centre, blocking the entrance and exit to our hospital. Blocking patients from receiving care that they need, makes me angry. It hurts. It hurts a lot," said one healthcare worker on Facebook.
WLNS reports another posting: "You are currently blocking ambulances, physicians and caregivers from making it to work to care for the sick and relieve the exhausted workers.
"You are the problem."
'Delusional,' 'Absolutely false': Governors cry foul on Trump testing claims said...
Governors across the country on Sunday pushed back on the Trump administration's claims that states are conducting a "sufficient" level of coronavirus testing.
Speaking with CNN's "State of the Union," Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, said it was "delusional" to suggest the states have enough tests to soon begin reopening their economies.
"That's just delusional to be making statements like that," Northam said. "We have been fighting every day for PPE. And we have got some supplies now coming in. We have been fighting for testing. It's not a — it's not a straightforward test. We don't even have enough swabs, believe it or not. And we're ramping that up. But for the national level say that we have what we need, and really to have no guidance to the state levels, is just irresponsible, because we're not there yet."
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, told CNN that the "lack of testing" is "probably the number one problem in America, and has been from the beginning of this crisis."
"And I have repeatedly made this argument to the leaders in Washington on behalf of the rest of the governors in America," Hogan said. "And I can tell you, I talk to governors on both sides of the aisle nearly every single day. The administration, I think, is trying to ramp up testing, and trying — they are doing some things with respect to private labs. But to try to push this off to say that the governors have plenty of testing, and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren't doing our job, is just absolutely false."
He added that governors have been "fighting and clawing to get more tests" from both the federal government and private labs, and are continuing to do so. He echoed Northam in saying there are shortages of swabs needed to conduct the tests, among other necessities.
"So, look, I think they have made some strides at the federal level," Hogan said. "I think states are all working hard on their own to find their own testing. Lab capacity has been increasing. But it's not accurate to say there's plenty of testing out there, and the governors should just get it done. That's just not being straightforward."
Public health experts have said testing would need to be at least doubled, or even tripled from current levels in order to allow for even a partial reopening of America's economy. Without such a massive increase, officials will lack a clear picture of who is infected, who can safely return to work, how and where the virus is spreading, and whether stay-at-home orders can begin to be eased, those experts said.
The White House's own recommendations, revised last week, note that robust testing is needed for states to begin easing coronavirus restrictions. The White House has said testing will be state-led, and that it believes enough tests are available for any state to move into the first phase of reopening...
But governors have said are short the necessary equipment to conduct widespread testing. Speaking with "Meet the Press," Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said he "could probably double, maybe even triple testing in Ohio virtually overnight if the FDA would prioritize companies that are putting a slightly different formula together for the extraction reagent kit.
'If anyone at the FDA is watching, this would really take our capacity up literally overnight, and that's what we need to get moving in Ohio," he added.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said her state also has the capacity to "double or triple the number of tests we are doing but we need some of the supplies."..
Hi, it's Joe Biden. That 1.6 million number is still your best guess based on the math, right? said...
"I'm fine at expressing myself."
That's a matter of opinion.
But if you vociferously attack people for protesting and then said you don't mind them protesting,
and you say you're "fine" at expressing yourself, I think your opinion is tainted with bias
"I even know how to explain a complicated topic."
well, for heaven's sake, why don't you use your knowledge here?
"While this makes it convenient for you to take concepts out of context and twist them around to suit your own malicious purposes,"
truth, which is comprised of more than empirical facts, is not malicious
when you make assertions that don't recognize that, you wind up in trouble
indeed, you do frequently
"Show those libs how stupid they are for their "politically correct" social distancing!"
I don't disagree with the social distancing that is being pursued
I merely think citizens are entitled to protest.
President Trump's handling of the coronavirus is certainly worth criticism, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is the wrong person to give it.
"He's a poor leader," she told ABC News's This Week on Sunday. "He's always trying to avoid responsibility and assign blame."
What followed this comment was a series of finger-pointing and deflections — made not by the president but by the speaker.
For the past week or so, Pelosi and the other Democratic leaders have refused to approve additional funding for the Paycheck Protection Program, a fund established by Congress earlier this month to help struggling small businesses amid the coronavirus pandemic. That fund has officially run dry, less than two weeks after launching.
Asked why she and her colleagues have rejected the Trump administration's request for an additional $250 billion in emergency funds to bolster the PPP, Pelosi avoided responsibility and assigned blame.
"Of course, we all support the Paycheck Protection Program," Pelosi said, adding that Democrats would like to see the program include funding for other sectors, too, before they approve the package in its entirety.
The Democrats are trying to do to the PPP what they did to Congress's $2 trillion relief package — they're trying to fill it with additional, unrelated funding that requires comprehensive debate. The small businesses shutting their doors don't have time for that debate, which is why Senate Republicans have pushed for a stand-alone bill that would immediately address the needs of the PPP, while tabling the Democrats' additional funding requests for Congress's next relief package. This seems like a straightforward, fair offer, but the Democrats have continued to stonewall, all while pointing the finger at Republicans.
So, it's difficult to take Pelosi seriously when she speaks of leadership. She clearly thinks of herself as a good leader, yet she continues to do that which she's condemned: She refuses to take responsibility for the PPP's funding shortage and points the finger at the other side of the political aisle instead.
This kind of hypocrisy isn't just tiresome, it comes at a real cost. Our economy is at a standstill, millions of Americans are losing their jobs every single week, and the PPP funding many businesses need to keep their doors open can no longer be relied upon. This is a serious problem that should never have been a problem in the first place. Congress could have immediately bolstered the PPP's funding had Pelosi and the other Democratic leaders demonstrated just an ounce of humility.
But here we are
Land of the Free, Home of the Stupid said...
"But if you vociferously attack people for protesting and then said you don't mind them protesting"
You have just highlighted the problem you have with reading comprehension.
Go back and read what I said again, more slowly this time, and maybe you'll begin to understand it.
I will expound upon it since it has apparently surpassed your cognitive limits.
The problem isn't with protesting per se - the problem is *endangering other people's lives* with their protests.
It's 2020 - there are MANY ways to get protest messages to our legislators these days - you can put a video on YouTube, write a letter or start a major letter-writing campaign, use the phone - they still work, start a Facebook group to air your grievances and get all of your like-minded friends to join you on it - maybe even convince local celebrities to join you on it and help amplify your message.
All of those can be used to get your message to legislators without risking the lives of fellow citizens or health care workers.
Use your brain man.
"I merely think citizens are entitled to protest."
I never said they weren't - like I said I'm fine with them protesting - but a bunch of a$$hat conservatives blocking entrances to hospitals during a pandemic? That should be a criminal offense. But I couldn't help notice you completely ignored that little inconvenient truth.
"truth, which is comprised of more than empirical facts, is not malicious"
If it's not an empirical fact, it's a feeling. You may like to dress up your beliefs in a special package and call them "religion," and get special protections and tax breaks for them, but in the end, all beliefs that can't be based in empirical facts boil down to just feelings.
That's just the truth.
And just because you BELIEVE something is "truth," (beyond empirical facts even) doesn't mean you can't be malicious with it - as you've proven on many occasions.
Hi, it's Joe Biden. Just checking to see if I can still rely on that 1.6 million math thingy said...
This is the first amendment to the Constitution. You might want to read the Constitution and all the amendments. It will help you not sound so ignorant all the time. People have a constitutional right to peaceably assemble to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
In all states, people are permitted to leave their house to shop and exercise. Democratic activity is just as important. The protests were brief and then people returned to their homes. Your alarmism, as always, is hyped.
Think about it. Then, you can say you used your brain, man.
"a bunch of a$$hat conservatives blocking entrances to hospitals during a pandemic? That should be a criminal offense. But I couldn't help notice you completely ignored that little inconvenient truth."
it's nothing to argue about. Someone saying it was inconvenient to get to the hospital because there was a protest? An obvious exaggeration. All the workers got to the hospital.
"If it's not an empirical fact, it's a feeling."
actually, you're wrong. If empirical facts aren't interpreted by logic and reason, they don't represent truth
That's just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
No they can't but that won't stop Rump from lying about it.
Trump says government will step up coronavirus testing efforts, after governors blast federal inaction
President Trump said on Sunday that the federal government is stepping up efforts to obtain vital supplies for coronavirus testing, hours after several governors from both parties faulted his administration for not doing enough to help states.
Public health experts say testing on a larger scale is a crucial step before resuming normal social and economic activity in the country. But Trump defended the administration's approach of leaving testing largely to states.
"Testing is a local thing," Trump said at a White House briefing. He said that too many governors were relying on state government labs and should turn to commercial labs to help them process more tests. He didn't name any particular states or officials.
But earlier Sunday, Republican and Democratic governors were unanimous in putting the onus on the federal government to help secure vital testing components, including swabs and reagents, the chemical solutions required to run the tests, which the governors said have been in short supply.
"To try to push this off to say that the governors have plenty of testing, and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren't doing our job, is just absolutely false," Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland told CNN's "State of the Union." "Every governor in America has been pushing and fighting and clawing to get more tests, not only from the federal government, but from every private lab in America and from all across the world."
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, which is working closely with officials in neighboring Maryland and the District, called Trump administration claims of sufficient testing "delusional."
"We've been fighting for testing," Northam, a physician, told CNN. "It's not a straightforward test. We don't even have enough swabs, believe it or not. And we're ramping that up."
Trump, displaying a nasal swab to reporters, said the federal government was procuring millions more swabs, and then claimed some states had lost the ones they were already sent.
"We also are going to be using, and we're preparing to use the Defense Production Act to increase swab production in one U.S. facility by over 20 million additional swabs per month," Trump said. "We've had a little difficulty with one. So we're going to call in — as we have in the past, as you know, we're calling in the Defense Production Act, and we'll be getting swabs very easily. Swabs are easy."
White House officials did not respond to requests for details about how the measure would be implemented. As of Sunday evening, there was no official paperwork released showing that the Defense Production Act had been invoked for swabs...
https://mcusercontent.com/ca678077bc522bd7bd74bacbf/files/3407e677-0744-4341-96c6-1b94a6b571b0/HHP_Apr20_PRESENTATION_vF_April.pdf
according to Harvard, Trump has the highest approval rating of his presidency, last reached in March 2017
"Please drop your angry, petty, disingenuous, blame-gaming, self-aggrandising daily briefing antics..." said...
"Mr President @realDonaldTrump, you won't want to watch this, but I hope you do. Please drop your angry, petty, disingenuous, blame-gaming, self-aggrandising daily briefing antics & start being a proper wartime president."
Trump's briefings, which sometimes last 90 minutes or longer as Trump's top doctors and coronavirus task force members sit in chairs waiting for a turn to speak. He has often berated reporters if they ask questions he doesn't appear to like, sometimes calling their questions "nasty." He has interrupted Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, to block him from answering a medical question about a drug Trump had been touting. He has played misleading, propaganda-like videos that praise his coronavirus response or attack the media.
His behavior has drawn criticism from both Democrats and Republicans, some of whom particularly spoke out after Trump claimed during one briefing that the presidency gave him "total" authority over states, or that coronavirus testing was a local responsibility.
"He has to put the country before himself. He has to put Americans before electioneering. He has to remind himself every day, what can I do today to prevent more lives being killed? Not how can I score more petty points, and stand here for two hours … and try to have arguments with the media."
"Donald Trump's approval ratings are falling, and the reason for that — he needs to understand this — they're falling because people don't trust him. They think he's turning these briefings into self-serving rallies, and they don't understand why he can't just do the basics of crisis leadership."
i don't know what I love more: our current Supreme Court or the electoral college.... said...
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that juries across the nation must be unanimous to convict or acquit a criminal defendant, outlawing the split verdicts enshrined in many state Constitutions by Democrats during the Jim Crow era.
In a 6-3 decision, the high court ruled that the Sixth Amendment's right to a jury trial implicitly requires a unanimous verdict, and that the need for jury consensus in federal courtrooms applies equally to state courts through the 14th Amendment.
"Wherever we might look to determine what the term 'trial by an impartial jury trial' meant at the time of the Sixth Amendment's adoption—whether it's the common law, state practices in the founding era, or opinions and treatises written soon afterward—the answer is unmistakable," wrote the eminent Justice Neil Gorsuch in Monday's majority opinion. "A jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict."
"You might want to read the Constitution and all the amendments."
We are well aware of the Constitution.
And as I said before, no one has considered rescinding it. That is simply not on anyone's agenda here.
Your repeated malicious insinuation that someone here is suggesting we undermine the Constitution is naked hyperbole and unwarranted alarmism.
You seem entirely incapable of recognizing that fact that with freedom comes responsibility. Use your damn brain. In times of a pandemic, when gathering in large numbers can put peoples' lives at risk, the RESPONSIBLE thing to do is find ways to protest that don't endanger your fellow American citizens.
I realize that would require a lot of conservatives to stop being a$$hat$ for a while, and that's a HUGE stretch for them. But given that they like to tout the importance of personal responsibility - rather than depending on the state, one might get the wild idea that maybe they could demonstrate that quality in times of emergency. Apparently that's too much to ask.
"actually, you're wrong. If empirical facts aren't interpreted by logic and reason, they don't represent truth"
No I'm not wrong. There's something you don't understand about what I stated.
The only way empirical truth can be determined IS by logic and reason - I thought that was pretty self evident.
However those facts aren't "interpreted" by logic and reason. The scientific method when applied properly is quite capable of determining whether something is a fact or not, and also when the data shows a trend or likelihood, but gaps in testing indicate the other mechanisms might be at play, and specific conclusions can not be reach with complete certainty. Data can be interpreted - facts are proven. If what you think is a fact isn't proven, it's a conjecture. If you feel a conjecture is correct, that is just a feeling.
"it's nothing to argue about. Someone saying it was inconvenient to get to the hospital because there was a protest? An obvious exaggeration. All the workers got to the hospital."
Careful there, your sociopath side is showing. I think this health care worker's assessment of the situation sums up the problem quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t-GzuZukQs
BTW, congrats on figuring out how to use a period! You even managed to make a paragraph! Heyyyy... wait a minute - did someone replace our regular troll?!?!
Remember the GOP Health Plan: If you get sick, hurry up and die said...
President Trump's daily coronavirus briefing rallies aren't even attempting to be relevant to the ongoing pandemic anymore. To the extent it even comes up, it's entirely Trump bragging about anything that's gone right and blaming others for everything that's gone wrong. If you want to know the latest information about the emergency, you'll need to look elsewhere. These are Trump campaign rallies done for the strict purpose of energizing his base.
You have probably read and heard vast amounts of reporting revealing the overwhelming failure of the Trump administration in this crisis. Just this weekend we learned that CDC officials were actually embedded with the World Health Organization in January and repeatedly alerted the U.S. government about the coronavirus outbreak, which completely undermines Trump's attack on the organization.
Unfortunately, the foot-dragging and the errors continue. The testing that everyone but Trump acknowledges must be in place before the economy can come back to life is still not available. Hospitals and first responders are still in dire need of medical equipment and protective gear. If the Trump administration pushes people back out of their homes prematurely, there's an excellent chance we'll have another outbreak well before we've recovered from the first one.
It's now obvious that will happen, at least in some places. In Jacksonville, Florida, officials opened the beaches and people flooded back out, with no masks and in close quarters. All over the country there have been small but vocal protests during the last few days, demanding that governors open their states immediately.
These "protests" are actually organized by astroturf groups modeled on the Tea Party protests more than a decade ago:
"FreedomWorks, the instrumental force behind the Tea Party, "is holding weekly virtual town halls with members of Congress, igniting an activist base of thousands of supporters across the nation to back up the effort" led by right-wing commentator Stephen Moore. the Associated Press reported. Other right-wing groups vocally opposing shutdowns include Americans for Prosperity, an organization funded by the Koch brothers, and the conservative Heritage Foundation. There is even a connection to the family of Trump's Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. As Michigan's governor noted, the DeVos family foundation helped fund Facebook ads for this week's protest. "
Pro-gun activists have gotten in on the act as well. It's an astroturf Tea Party reunion tour. If there's one thing that riles up the right wing, it's apparently the government trying to save lives.
https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/status/1251843739506683904?s=20
Trump has personally praised the protesters, as has Vice President Pence, even as they both pretend to care about their new guidelines for opening up the country.
Big-money donors seem to have activated their astroturf groups to get people out in the streets to make sure that Trump feels the pressure from his beloved base to open up the economy. These donors care about preserving their power, privilege and profit margins, but Trump only cares about the November election. They are manipulating him, and his supporters, to make him believe that his ends are aligned with theirs....
hi, it's Joe Biden. is the math on that 1.6 million still good? I already paid for the ads said...
the coronavirus is in all fifty states
and, yet, 50% of cases and 60% of deaths are in four states
all run by Dem governors
BIG BLUE STATES
a couple of weeks ago, some loudmouth TTFer said the over-representation of blue states wouldn't last
but it has
"We are well aware of the Constitution."
referring to oneself in plural
like the Queen
no comment needed
"And as I said before, no one has considered rescinding it. That is simply not on anyone's agenda here."
you keep talking yourself into a corner and getting angry at me about it
to recap, I noted that the Constitution guaranteed the right of protest, assuming you were familiar with the document
my bad
you noted they could just protest online
I had to point out that the Constitution specifically guaranteed the right to peaceably assmeble to petition the government for redress of grievances
maybe you could get a "Constitutional Law for Dummies" book !!
"Your repeated malicious insinuation that someone here is suggesting we undermine the Constitution is naked hyperbole and unwarranted alarmism."
well, it's alarming but hardly hype
I bet you oppose placing originalist judges on the Supreme Court
that undermines the Constitution
"The only way empirical truth can be determined IS by logic and reason - I thought that was pretty self evident."
you've got it bass-ackwards
"empirical truth" is an oxymoron
empiricism is mere observation
selecting empirical data and applying reason reveals truth
not the other way around
did you go to college?
if so, please tell us where
we need a little levity in the pandemic age
The virus has hit large, dense cities with major international airports earliest and hardest. Airborne viruses spread most easily in population dense cities. Their suffering is due to the physics of airborne infections, not Democratic governors.
Somebody thought is was a great idea to stop Chinese folks from coming in and infecting people. We now know that really didn't help - the DNA shows that the infections were coming from Europe. But governors don't have the authority to stop international flights.
"empirical truth" is an oxymoron"
No moron, the definition of empirical truth is:
exact conformity as learned by observation or experiment between judgments or propositions and externally existent things in their actual status and relations
The definition of oxymoron is:
a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true ).
"empiricism is mere observation"
The definition of empiricism is:
the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume.
I never brought up empiricism, and I specifically noted that "empirical truth" required logic and reason, which is implied by "judgement or propositions" portion of the definition.
So you have set yourself up another straw man argument to knock down based on your own misunderstanding of the definitions. Great job!
"I had to point out that the Constitution specifically guaranteed the right to peaceably assmeble [sic] to petition the government for redress of grievances"
No, you didn't have to point that out. People are well aware of that right. They teach it in grade school. Most people though realize that when there is a highly contagious virus causing a planet-wide pandemic, peaceably assembling in any numbers is stupid idea fraught with serious personal and public danger... and there really isn't much point in peaceably assembling after you're dead.
But go ahead, peaceably assemble with all your friends - far away from everyone else - and then quarantine yourselves in the interest of public safety.
"I bet you oppose placing originalist judges on the Supreme Court
that undermines the Constitution"
Of course I oppose "originalist judges." "Originalist" is the euphemism right-wingers came up with to try and hide their hard-right activist judges. There's nothing actually "originalist" about them.
Corporations aren't people. The Constitution starts out with "We the People," not "We the Corporation." The founders put forth a democracy. We no longer have that. We have an oligarchy:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/core-reader
Republicans are hell-bent in furthering the cause of corporations at the expense of "We the People," and think they can hide behind a simple euphemism to get it done.
Count me out for that. I'd rather have the democracy back. And then of course there's the whole business of women not being allowed to vote, and slavery being legal. I'm not an "originalist" for that either.
I'm all for the Constitution... just not the one you want to twist it into.
Coronavirus, Wages, Healthcare
Stopping the Runaway Train
A Warning from the Past
Elitism and Education
What Do They Want?