The Trump Pandemic

[Tero]

Despite the safety measures and positive spin, meat packers are still getting sick:
He says they take your temperature when you go in, and makes sure you wear a face shield and gloves, and they practically have sanitizing stations every 6 feet.

https://www.klkntv.com/smithfield-foods ... ete-plant/

[Tero]

[BarnettNewman]

You do you, though. Maybe go out for a nice trot around in the snow.

I always thought when cunt had the trots he deposited it here.

[BarnettNewman]

Sitting under the shadow of Lincoln

99720F18-E692-42E8-915C-AC781F0BBFE4.jpeg

Trump goes: It was Obama! It was China!

"Our projections have always been between 100-240,000 American lives lost and that's with full mitigation and us learning from each other of how to social distance," Birx told Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday."
CNN

[BarnettNewman]

What a difference a day makes. Yesterday, Trump was talking about disbanding his coronavirus task force because it had outlived its usefulness and the administration was going to go full speed ahead on rebuilding the economy; today, Time magazine issued this week’s cover: an “OPEN” sign with the N ripped off and put in front of the other letters to spell “NOPE.” The administration’s attempt to pivot from a focus on the botched response to the virus toward a triumphant story of the economy has foundered as reality has caught up with Trump’s cheery narrative.
Yesterday we learned that Rick Bright, the scientist who directed the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the federal agency charged with developing a vaccine for this coronavirus, has filed a whistleblower complaint. The complaint alleges he was demoted for refusing to spend his agency's money on developing hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug the administration was promoting for use against Covid-19. But the complaint goes on to charge that the administration pressured him “to ignore expert recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”
In a very detailed 63-page report, Bright claims that he warned the leadership at Health and Human Services about the coronavirus on January 10, but was first ignored and then ostracized for his insistence that action to prepare for an epidemic was crucial. He says the everyone in the administration except trade advisor Peter Navarro simply refused to take his warnings seriously. Throughout February, Bright peppered administration officials with memos, begging them to secure medical equipment to prepare for the epidemic. Finally, they lost patience with him in March, when he refused to back hydroxychloroquine when the president was touting it as a possible cure for Covid.
Bright told a reporter about the dangers of the drug, and days later was removed from the directorship of BARDA to a post at the National Institutes of Health, because political appointees Alex Azar, the head of HHS, and Dr. Robert Kadlec, Bright’s immediate boss, suspected him of being a source for the article. Bright claims to have been retaliated against for his role as a whistleblower, and is demanding his old job back.
Bright’s whistleblower report was only one of two that offered a window into the administration’s fumbling of the epidemic. We learned that on April 8, a volunteer on Jared Kushner’s coronavirus task force, filed a whistleblower complaint with the House Oversight Committee. Kushner's group took the place of established channels staffed by experts in order to coordinate a private sector effort to find the medical supplies America needed. The complaint, supported by anonymous individuals in the government, says that the people working with Kushner were young volunteers from consulting and private equity firms with no significant experience in health care, procurement, or supply-chain operations, and had no knowledge of relevant laws or regulations. They were ill equipped to do their jobs, and were also ordered to pay particular attention to tips from “VIPs,” including conservative journalists like Brian Kilmeade and Jeanine Pirro, as they searched for medical equipment.
Today, Politico published a story based on audio tapes leaked from three conference calls between HHS and Federal Emergency Management Agency officials and federal officials around the country fielding calls from governors trying to find medical equipment. The calls highlight that as Trump was saying the nation had plenty of equipment, his officials were scrambling to try to provide it. The leaked tapes also show officials privately acknowledging that reopening the states would lead to a higher rate of coronavirus infections.
In an interview with ABC News yesterday, Trump himself admitted the reopening of states for business could cause people to die. At a briefing, when reporter Jim Acosta asked why it was important to end social distancing right now, Trump told reporters "I'm viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They're warriors. We can't keep our country closed. We have to open our country ... Will some people be badly affected? Yes."
But Trump didn’t offer much to provide confidence that the government was on top of the ongoing coronavirus response. In the ABC News interview, when Trump blamed President Barack Obama for leaving the “cupboard” of the Strategic National Stockpile “bare” of medical supplies when he left office, anchor David Muir asked him what he had done to restock it in the three years he’s been in office. The question appeared to catch the president, who is accustomed to a friendly audience on the Fox News Channel, off guard. “Well, I'll be honest,” he said. “I have a lot of things going on. We had a lot of people that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on Russia, Russia, Russia. That turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did Ukraine, Ukraine and that was a total hoax, then they impeached the president of the United States for absolutely no reason.”
A Washington Post article by Dr. Zack Cooper, associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale’s Economics Department, says that we do, in fact, have the ability to test at the rate of 20 million tests a day, which is what experts say we need in order to reopen the economy safely. But the rub is that it would cost about $250 billion, and there has not, so far, been sufficient political will to spend that kind of money on testing, especially when those most affected by the reopening of states have been poor Americans and workers who are disproportionately people of color. A Rockefeller Foundation committee on reopening the economy has published a report on how to do so safely; Cooper was a member of the committee.
But for all these events undercutting Trump’s push to reopen the economy, what got under his skin most dramatically was an advertisement released Monday by the Lincoln Group entitled “Mourning in America.” This one-minute spot plays on President Ronald Reagan’s famous “Morning In America” reelection campaign ad, showing Trump’s term as the opposite of the rosy vision people associated with Reagan. “There’s mourning in America,” the voice in the ad intones over shots of Covid-stricken patients and folks in unemployment lines in masks, “and under the leadership of Donald Trump, our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer. And now, Americans are asking, ‘If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?”
It took Trump four tweets to express his fury adequately, calling Lincoln Project founder George Conway a “deranged loser.” Ten hours later, he was still fuming, and ranted about the Lincoln Project to reporters for two minutes on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. This gave Conway the opening to hit him again in an op-ed in the Washington Post today. The article used Trump’s behavior to illustrate Conway’s usual concerns about Trump’s fitness for office, but it began with a new focus on the coronavirus: “Americans died from Covid-19 at the rate of about one every 42 seconds during the past month. That ought to keep any president awake at night.”

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrich ... 0793552974

TDS clearly.

[Brian Peacock]

TDS? Too Darn Sexy?

[BarnettNewman]

What position?

If I recall correctly, you were of the opinion that Q was NOT coordinating their messages with the White House (Trump etc.)

To date I have not come across any evidence that Q is (are) coordinating their messages with the White House (Trump etc.). That remains my position until evidence for coordination comes to light.

Excellent. Thanks again for clarifying.

When evidence sufficient to convince you does emerge, I look forward to seeing if you think it changes the value of the information being released.

No secret here - I think it is the same as the Dem leaks, but on the Rep side. Disinfo. And the question you weighed in on, I am NOT qualified to answer.

I doubt you are, either, so we're in the same boat there.

Both of us are qualified to evaluate information, regardless of where it comes from, or how. So, if Reuters gets its hands on a copy of a leaked report from an anonymous source, and publishes details from it, I tend to give that information some credence. Scuttlebutt spread by anonymous sources regarding Pizzagate type information, not so much.

I also discriminate between anonymous sources depending on who cites them. For instance, although Simon Hersh can get things spectacularly wrong, he usually gets them right. Alex Jones not so much.

One way to evaluate is to look at how they handle non-anonymous sources and work your way from there.

[Cunt]

You do you, though. Maybe go out for a nice trot around in the snow.

I always thought when cunt had the trots he deposited it here.

Written as a true non-runner, who has obvious inexperience getting the trots out on a snowy trail.

One way to evaluate is to look at how they handle non-anonymous sources and work your way from there.

That's not bad, but I like to also focus on 'anonymous sources'.

So whenever a 'news report' contains words like 'sources close to the matter', or 'government sources', I assume they mean q, and treat it with the same veracity of any other highly-suspect 'source'.

[Tero]

Give up meat, folks!

[laklak]

Lock down is hurting Native American casinos badly, more than many other industries. What to do? Trump wants to open everything up to kill more brown people, but if we keep it shut then the red people suffer. You're a racist if you do and a racist if you don't. Untenable position.

[Tero]

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[JimC]

Here is an interesting article by a local columnist whose writing I usually respect:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/pand ... 54r73.html

It focuses on the US-Australia relationship, but is harsher on Trump than usual. An excerpt:

Another unfortunate spin-off of the Prime Minister’s focus on China’s knowledge of COVID-19’s origins was that it enmeshed Australia in Trump’s attempts to make China entirely responsible for the pandemic purely for his own electoral purposes.

Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are fully engaged in a disinformation campaign on this front. They need to make Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic in America someone else’s fault.

As he should, Morrison has walked back at speed from any implied connection with this effort, which is just one more outrage by Trump in a multitude of outrages. So many dreadful things have either been encouraged, said or done by Trump that each new one barely registers anymore.

He doesn’t care about protesters who want an end to social distancing mandates brandishing firearms in a state congressional house. Nor, even more disturbingly, does it appear to bother large numbers of Americans. This is but one example of the rising depravity of public discourse in modern America.

Similarly, America is now reopening for business with Trump’s blessing, without having overcome the first wave of COVID-19 infections. Incapable of emotions that are not related to compensating for his own insecurities, he has given up trying to fight the virus.

Trump is not the first incompetent to inhabit the White House but none of his sub-standard predecessors have strip-mined the nation’s forms of governance and moral standing like him. Nor has it been done with such solid and consistent support from so many American voters. That should concern Australians.

Trump has a good chance of re-election. Polls suggest he is not far below the 46 per cent vote that gave him victory in 2016. And if he loses in November, what happens to those tens of millions of Americans who are devoted to his destructive style of political leadership? They’ll still be there. The seeds of America’s long-term decline have germinated and it’s hard to see how Joe Biden will have the standing or the energy to reverse that.

The US in 2020 resembles a failed state, with a fabulist for a leader and political polarities that cannot be reconciled even by an untreatable pandemic that has already killed 80,000 citizens and is certain to kill many tens of thousands more. Knowing this, whether Australia can afford to continue to place so much trust and reliance on America is an open question, given that the disparity between the two countries' values is becoming greater.

We've learnt that we have less in common with America and Americans than we thought. These first few months of the COVID-19 era have demonstrated that Australia has a stronger polity. Australians have behaved better, for longer, than Americans. For all our shortcomings and the stresses of the past two months, we’ve maintained a spirit of solidarity and a firm notion of what’s best for ourselves and our community.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Something must be done about these nasty whistleblowers.

'"Criminal Negligence": Trump Officials Ignored Company's Offer to Make 7 Million N95 Masks Per Month in Early Days of Pandemic'

Progressives on Saturday denounced an "infuriating" report which detailed the Department of Health and Human Services' refusal to take an American company up on its offer to supply millions of N95 respirators to the government early on in the coronavirus pandemic.

The Washington Post reported that federal scientist Rick Bright, who filed a whistleblower complaint last week over his demotion following his criticism of the Trump administration's response to the pandemic, detailed communications with Prestige Ameritech in January in which HHS ignored the medical supply company's offer to produce masks.

The head of the Ft. Worth-based company, Michael Bowen, wrote to HHS on January 23, two days after the U.S. confirmed its first case of Covid-19.

Bowen offered to use four dormant production lines to produce as many as seven million N95 masks per month, but was told by Laura Wolf, director of the Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection at HHS, "I don't believe we as a government are anywhere near answering those questions for you yet."

"We are the last major domestic mask company," replied Bowen, who at the time was fulfilling orders for masks from all over the world. "My phones are ringing now, so I don't 'need' government business. I'm just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad."

In Bright's whistleblower complaint, he described how he tried to direct Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec's attention to Bowen's offer in late January. Bowen wrote to Bright following his communications with Wolf that "U.S. mask supply is at imminent risk," and adding a blunt warning: "Rick, I think we’re in deep shit."

Bright demanded to know from Kadlec why Bowen's offer had fallen "on deaf ears."

"We have been watching and receiving warnings on this for over a week," the scientist wrote.

The agency's refusal to take Bowen up on his offer early on helped lead to a crisis weeks later, as healthcare workers across the country reported severe shortages of N95 masks as well as other personal protective equipment needed to stop the spread of Covid-19 in healthcare settings. As the Trump administration denied several times that it was responsible for making sure states had the supplies they needed, states were forced in bidding wars with one another over equipment orders that they placed directly with manufacturers.

[BarnettNewman]

So they didn’t in fact need to threaten a trade war with Canada.

Perfect response to C-19. The Best. Flawless.

[Brian Peacock]

Here is an interesting article by a local columnist whose writing I usually respect:

https://www.theage.com.au/national/pand ... 54r73.html

It focuses on the US-Australia relationship, but is harsher on Trump than usual. An excerpt:

Another unfortunate spin-off of the Prime Minister’s focus on China’s knowledge of COVID-19’s origins was that it enmeshed Australia in Trump’s attempts to make China entirely responsible for the pandemic purely for his own electoral purposes.

Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are fully engaged in a disinformation campaign on this front. They need to make Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic in America someone else’s fault.

<snip> ....

Lets accept, for the sake of argument, that China deliberately released the virus into it's own population in order to infect the world. What does that really change about how we deal with it? Are we going to nuke China in retaliation? Even if that were an option how does that change how we deal with the virus at home? It changes nothing - the infection remains transmissible within the population. The only possible reason for pointing the finger of blame at China is to say, "We're failing to deal with this because of China." But China don't control what happens in the US (or Australia, or the UK etc) do they - so this is clearly a political move to shift attention, and with it responsibility, away from the domestic response, which the government of the US does have control of, and onto China, which the government of the US doesn't have control over. Basically, it's an admission of guilt, of culpability, of previous and ongoing failure.