Follow live updates: https://t.co/l2faKyz4LO and see more video here: https://t.co/8PQcoSUadP pic.twitter.com/w80dNua9qG— Reuters (@Reuters) April 11, 2020
US coronavirus death toll passes 20,000 and overtakes Italy as world's highesthttps://t.co/LTrLKY5282 pic.twitter.com/LKEX9EDnt1— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 11, 2020
Pope Francis will break with centuries of tradition and livestream Easter Sunday mass to allow the world's 1.3 billion Catholics celebrate their holiest holiday under a #coronavirus lockdown https://t.co/g5XqCVI0WF— AFP news agency (@AFP) April 12, 2020
Denmark will reopen schools and day care centers on Wednesday as it relaxes lockdown after number of coronavirus cases stabilizes https://t.co/A9fA2IQVWn— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) April 11, 2020
North Korea calls for stronger measures against the rapidly spreading #coronavirus at a meeting presided by leader Kim Jong Un, state media reports, without acknowledging whether the country has reported any infections https://t.co/kgcymiqGw0— AFP news agency (@AFP) April 12, 2020
The Pyramids of Egypt light up today. Stay home, stay safe. 🇪🇬 pic.twitter.com/pcOZRcVLe4— Crazy World (@CrazyGloble) March 31, 2020
57 comments:
Tyrannical ***DEMOCRAT*** Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer Prohibits Grocery Stores From Selling Vegetable Seeds
Rather have people dependent on government than self sufficient.
The Democrat Governor is leaving Stage III and entering STAGE IV. If allowed, she will have mass incarcerations before going full Che.
STUNNING! Sweden and Brazil Kept Their Economies Open During COVID-19 Pandemic and Their Numbers Are Dropping Faster Than US
Inconvenient Truth
Deranged WaPo Writer: ‘Biden Needs To Accuse Trump Of Willingness To Kill People’
Aren't the words "deranged" and "WaPo writer" redundant?
Only stupid people read the Washington Post.
On Jennifer Rubin
"Hollywood animator and trade union leader Steve Hulett described her to Media Matters as "always funny, with sharp observations. I never got the impression she was anything but a Democrat ... she was mildly critical of some of Kerry's campaign moves during the '04 campaign, but she wasn't in the Bush camp "
President Donald Trump appeared bored on Saturday as coronavirus kept him off the golf course for a second weekend in a row.
Three hours before Trump was scheduled to appear on "Justice" with former Judge Jeanine Pirro, the leader of the free world lashed out at the network.
Trump is extending his only-on-Fox interview streak. Fresh off a phone call with Hannity earlier this week, Trump will be calling into "Justice with Judge Jeanine" tonight. Details in @ReliableSources >> https://t.co/YgZzZuz0Qu
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) April 11, 2020
"Watching Fox News on weekend afternoons is a total waste of time. We now have some great alternatives, like
OANN," Trump posted on Twitter.
Watching @FoxNews on weekend afternoons is a total waste of time. We now have some great alternatives, like @OANN.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020
OANN, which stands for One America News Network, is a new network challenging Fox News for viewers by offering an even more conservative bent.
This is not the first time Trump has pontificated on how he sees the differences between the two right-wing cable networks.
Watching Fake News CNN is better than watching Shepard Smith, the lowest rated show on @FoxNews. Actually, whenever possible, I turn to @OANN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2019
Trump has been a big fan of OANN:
Report: Trump Privately Asks Why Government Can't Just Let COVID 'Wash Over' The Country
By Cristina Cabrera
2 minutes
President Donald Trump reportedly has been privately suggesting an eyebrow-raising solution to the COVID-19 outbreak consuming the nation: Let it keep doing that.
The Washington Post reported on Saturday that during a Situation Room meeting on the pandemic in March, Trump asked White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”
Two unnamed sources told the Post that Fauci was stunned by the question.
“Mr. President, many people would die,” the doctor reportedly told Trump.
Other unnamed officials said that Trump has “repeatedly” (in the Post’s words) asked the same question in the Oval Office.
Trump reportedly began mulling over the idea after hearing about the United Kingdom’s now-abandoned “mitigation” strategy that would let COVID-19 spread throughout the country with few movement restrictions imposed on the population in the hopes of building a “herd immunity” against the virus.
One dependable defender of the president, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, made a plea this week for the president to dial back the combative and boastful performances, inspiring a rebuke on Twitter from Trump himself. And on Friday, the Journal sent out another missive in the dispute dripping with condescension.
"Thanks for reading, sir, and we agree the briefings are an excellent way to communicate directly with Americans," the board wrote in reply to his tweet, which defended the briefings by citing their ratings.
Then the editorial got straight to the heart of the issue, noting that the president wasn't the driver of the rating numbers. The crisis is.
"Our point was about the way Mr. Trump is communicating about a subject that is literally a life and death matter," it said. "That's the reason they're a ratings hit, not because people enjoy Donald Trump sparring with the White House press corps like a Packers-Bears game."
The fact that the editorial board felt the need to explain this simple idea — that a deadly virus is more significant than his star power and petty feuds — should be signal to its members that their consistent support for the president has all along been deeply misguided. But don't expect that much reflection from the Journal or many of the president's other defenders.
The board also felt the need to explain to Trump that the only metrics that should matter for him involve defeating the virus and rescuing the economy. If he can do both successfully, he's likely to have his approval rating soar along with his chances for re-election.
But Trump can't actually think that far ahead. He lives moment to moment; he rises and falls with the daily news cycle. It's one of the many reasons he's not capable of doing the job his office requires.
Anon--the Washington Post is one of the mnost respected papers in the nation,. For you to call them stupid simply shows hiow little you know.
The Chinese parrot squawks! See above, must be related to a squid.
Dummy continues with name-calling because he is low IQ and has nothing to say--got that from home schooling
The Pentagon first learned about the new coronavirus in December from open source reports emanating from China. By early January, warnings about the virus had made their way into intelligence reports circulating around the government. On Jan. 3, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, received a call from his Chinese counterpart with an official warning.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, was alerted to the virus around the same time — and within two weeks was fearful it could bring global catastrophe.
Full Coverage: Virus Outbreak
Quickly, U.S. intelligence and public health officials began doubting China’s reported rates of infection and death toll. They pressed China to allow in U.S. epidemiologists — both to assist the country in confronting the spread and to gain valuable insights that could help buy time for the U.S. response. U.S. officials also pressed China to send samples of the virus to U.S. labs for study and for vaccine and test development.
On Jan. 11, China shared the virus’ genetic sequence. That same day, the National Institutes of Health started working on a vaccine.
Ultimately, the U.S. was able to get China’s consent to send two people on the WHO team that traveled to China later in the month. But by then precious weeks had been lost and the virus had raced across Asia and had begun to escape the continent.
___
BALANCING ACT
For much of January, administration officials were doing a delicate balancing act.
Internally, they were raising alarms about the need to get Americans on the ground in China. Publicly, they were sending words of encouragement and praise in hopes Beijing would grant the Americans access.
Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, persistently urged more aggressive action in calling out China and sending teams there.
But while word of the virus was included in several of the president’s intelligence briefings, Trump wasn’t fully briefed on the threat until Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar called with an update on Jan. 18 while the president was at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Trump spent much of the conversation wanting to talk about vaping; he was considering a new policy restricting its use. White House officials now believe Trump didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the threat to the U.S. in part because Azar, who was feuding with several members of Trump’s inner circle, did a poor job communicating it.
Azar was trying to walk a fine line between Trump’s upbeat statements and preparing the government for what might lie ahead. “America’s risk is low at the moment,” he later told House lawmakers. “That could change quickly.”
Keep lying Lapides you do it soooo well!
The West Wing was adrift.
By late January, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney held the post in name only as rumors swirled of his impending, post-impeachment departure. He was on the initial coronavirus task force, which was plagued with infighting. At the same time, the White House Office of Management and Budget was clashing with Azar’s HHS over money to combat the virus.
HHS wanted to send a special coronavirus funding request to Congress but the White House budget office resisted for weeks, insisting that HHS should instead repurpose $250 million of its existing budget to bolster the national stockpile by buying protective equipment. HHS, however, claimed that without congressional authorization it could not buy the needed quantities of masks, gowns and ventilators to rapidly bolster the national stockpile
Eventually, an initial request went to Congress for $2.5 billion in virus aid, an amount that lawmakers of both parties dismissed as too low. The bill that Congress quickly passed and Trump signed — the first of three so far — was for $8 billion.
Even as the two agencies fought, there was no influential voice in Trump’s orbit pushing him to act swiftly on the pandemic. Trump had surrounded himself with loyalists and few in the administration, including national security adviser Robert O’Brien, were able to redirect the president’s attention. In mid-January, meetings were being held at the White House, but the focus was on getting U.S. government employees back from China, which was still playing down how contagious the virus was.
A Jan. 29 memo from senior White House aide Peter Navarro accurately predicted some of the challenges faced by the U.S. from what would become a pandemic, though he was hardly the first to sound the alarm. But he, like Pottinger, was viewed by others in the White House as a “China hawk” and their concerns were rejected by others in the administration who did not bring them to the president.
On Jan. 30, the WHO declared the virus a global health emergency while Trump held a packed campaign rally in Iowa. The next day, the Trump administration banned admittance to the United States by foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the past 14 days, excluding the immediate family members of American citizens or permanent residents.
Trump styled it as bold action, but continued to talk down the severity of the threat. Despite the ban, nearly 40,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China since that date, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
___
‘VERY, VERY READY’
On Feb. 10, Trump stood before thousands of supporters packed into a New Hampshire rally and declared: “By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
The crowd roared its approval at Trump’s unproven assertion. The Senate had acquitted Trump on the impeachment charges and the president shifted his focus toward reelection even as others in the administration keyed in on the virus.
Federal officials put the CDC solely in charge of developing a test for the virus and left out private interests, a choice that cost precious time when the resulting CDC test proved faulty.
Trump spent many weeks shuffling responsibility for leading his administration’s response to the crisis. He put Azar in charge of the administration’s virus task force before replacing him with Vice President Mike Pence toward the end of February. Even as the virus spread across the globe, prevailing voices in the White House, including senior adviser Jared Kushner and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, urged the president to avoid big steps that could roil financial markets.
The president had firmly linked his fate to Wall Street, and it took a tumble by the markets for Trump to ratchet up his response. In late February, while Trump was on a trip to India, the Dow Jones plummeted 1,000 points amid rising fears about the coronavirus.
Trump stewed about the collapse on his Feb. 26 flight back to Washington and lashed out at aides over comments made by a top CDC official, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, during a briefing the prior day, when she warned Americans that they would have to prepare for fairly severe social distancing.
“It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen,” she said.
The White House announced that Pence would brief the media about the response that night. But Trump took the podium instead and has not relinquished the stage much since, belatedly making himself the face of the battle against the virus.
When Trump first took the lectern in the White House briefing room to speak about the virus, the U.S. had 15 coronavirus patients.
“We’re at that very low level, and we want to keep it that way,” Trump said. “We’re very, very ready for this.”
Lapides, I thought you were an ace Intel guy! You're producing comments like this and are expecting people to believe you! It must really bug you that "Home schooled people" are smarter than you.
Don't know about the other guys, but yes you are a liar and a very bad one at that.
GO AHEAD: YOU HAVE CONSISTENTLY CALLED ME A LIAR: PROVE IT!
SEE: MOMMY IGNORED YOUR NEEDS AND NOW YOU DRIBBLE TO SHOW HOW SMART YOU ARE. NOPE. YOU REVEAL WHO AND WHAT YOU ARE, NAMELESS MISFIT
You convict yourself of lying with your own mouth, there is no need for me to point it out.
Your past is catching up to you!
What's the matter Lapides the heat in the kitchen too much for you?
REPEAT ALL THE BULLSHIT YOU WANT: YOU HAVE YET TO SHOW ONE LIE AND YOU CLAIM I LIE...IT NOW TURNS OUT THAT MOMMY'S LITTLE BOY/GIRL IS THE LIAR. PUT UP OR SHIT YOUR PANTIES AGAIN,/BABYThe Trump administration's response to the pandemic is led by its main task force, run by Vice President Mike Pence. Then there's the new Opening Our Country Council, which is charged with reopening the economy. And there's Jared Kushner's shadow group, which apparently jumps in here and there. Still another group has emerged, the Washington Post reports: six doctors who meet on their own almost daily. That cadre grew out of frustration with what one official called "the voodoo" espoused in the task force's daily briefings, such as President Trump's endorsement of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment. That group is led by Deborah Birx. The layering and overlapping of groups has only complicated the administration's response, by creating a series of competing forces with often-different goals—but no clear strategy for dealing with the pandemic.
For example, a subset of the main task force, a supply-chain unit, has favored large corporations over small ones, even those with a strong record of helping in emergencies. The unit, under the sway of Kushner, has created a complex new emergency response system. Operating secretly and with little accountability, the group has produced confusion and distrust among the states and the people needing supplies, per NBC. Some in the administration just want to reopen the country. "They already know what they want to do and they're looking for ways to do it," a senior official told the Post. Trump suggested one strategy to the task force last month: letting the virus run through the country, leaving the survivors with immunity. "Why don’t we let this wash over the country?" he asked Dr. Anthony Fauci. "Mr. President, many people would die," Fauci told him. (Read more coronavirus stories.)
Anon 10:02 AM,
"Keep lying Lapides you do it soooo well!"
He's been trolling for years.
Is it not a bit idiotic to believe that some chemicals can bond and billions of years later it has developed fine senses, deep emotions and religions?
No Makes more sense than bible junk
"Is the god of the Israeli people the same god as that of Christians?"
"No He is jewish"
Note the same lack of punctuation and capitalization.
These Fredicisms are not due to old age. He published a book on the stuff.
He is never going to stop.
There was a conversation on a thread about 3 or 4 years ago here at WNU.
Someone offered the firm opinion that you could describe some people as rightwing or arch-conservative, but to say or write leftwing or Arch-liberal was sacrilege, did not make any sense.
As I posted yesterday, such a person makes Archie Bunker look like a saint. You will note that by the late date of Archie Bunker's Place that Archie had come around. Unfortunately, Meathead and you know who have not.
Consider David Horowitz was ill treated as a young Jewish person growing up in the US. Not to the extent of an African-American, but nonetheless got a very cold shoulder at times. Horowitz grew up; someone else did not and never will.
The Kansas Supreme Court has voted to uphold an executive order by the state's governor limiting the size of church gatherings on Easter Sunday, ending a dramatic legal clash in which the court was asked amid a global pandemic to decide between public health and religious liberty.
In a ruling issued on Saturday, the court said Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly was within her rights when she announced an order on Tuesday limiting religious gatherings in the state to 10 people. The ruling came after an extraordinary morning session in which the court's seven justices heard oral arguments via videoconference in order to comply with social distancing guidelines.
"We agreed to expedite these proceedings due to the nature of the public health emergency all agree is present," the court said in the majority opinion.
Map: Tracking The Spread Of The Coronavirus In The U.S.
Prior to Kelly's order, religious institutions in Kansas were exempt from the state's 10-person limit for social gatherings. But with the number of coronavirus cases in the state climbing, Kelly said she was forced to revise the guideline.
"As Holy Week gets underway – and with Kansas rapidly approaching its projected 'peak' infection rate in the coming weeks – the risk for a spike in COVID-19 cases through church gatherings is especially dangerous," the governor said in a Tuesday statement. "This was a difficult decision, and not one I was hoping to have to make."
The following day, Republican leaders on the state's Legislative Coordinating Council voted to revoke the order, calling it a violation of the constitutional right to freedom of religion and an example of executive overreach.
Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.
The humorist Alexandra Petri once likened Trump to a goldfish, a purely reactive animal lost in a “pastless, futureless, contextless void.” This is an apt comparison, with one major flaw: Goldfish are not malevolent, and do not corrode the will and decency of those who gaze on them.
In his daily coronavirus briefings, Trump lumbers to the podium and pulls us into his world: detached from reality, unable to feel any emotions but anger and paranoia. Each time we watch, Trump’s spiritual poverty increases our own, because for the duration of these performances, we are forced to live in the same agitated, immediate state that envelops him. (This also happens during Trump’s soul-destroying rallies, but at least those are directed toward his fans, not an entire nation in peril.)
Read: How the pandemic will end
Most leaders would at least have the sense not to relitigate every vendetta in their personal Burn Book at such moments. That’s what rallies and sycophantic interviews with Fox News are for, after all. Indeed, polls now suggest that even the president’s base might be tiring of this exhibitionism. But that is irrelevant to Trump. With cable news constantly covering the pandemic, he seems to be going through withdrawal. He needs an outlet for his political glossolalia, or his constantly replenishing reservoir of grievance and insecurity will burst its seams.
Even Trump’s staff—itself a collection of morally compromised enablers—cannot cajole him or train him to sound like a normal human being. Trump begins every one of these disastrous briefings by hypnotically reading high-minded phrases to which he shows no connection.
“Nobody takes things more personally than me,” Donald Trump once said on an episode of his reality television show, “The Apprentice.”
It’s a mantra Trump as president regularly uses as a political cudgel, a sentiment he inserts into his speeches or his banter with reporters to signal how much he cares.
With the coronavirus, though, things appear to be actually getting personal for Trump. After initially downplaying the burgeoning outbreak, the president’s tenor changed as he started reflecting publicly about a friend who was in a coma after becoming infected and recounting the chaos at a hospital near his childhood home in Queens. He’s repeatedly waxed about what it means to have the pandemic leaving society isolated on Easter, which the president has personalized as “a very special day for me.”
The coronavirus has also encircled the president, making it even more personal, with guests near Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort testing positive, and political allies like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson falling ill.
“For Trump it was something that made him realize it could hit celebrity America, and I think that brought it more vividly alive to him than statistics,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley.
Yet Trump’s personalization of the crisis has another form, a “me vs. them” dynamic that critics say has caused Trump to favor those who are personal allies, or those who credit him personally.
It’s part of a broader pattern for the president — at times, he seems convinced of a cause only after he feels a personal connection. His involvement in regulating e-cigarettes, for instance, was spurred by the first lady’s pressure, and his remarks on the topic included rare anecdotes about his teenage son, Barron.
Presidents throughout history have dealt with speculation about how their personal histories color their reactions to history-making moments. When Trayvon Martin was killed, Barack Obama generated countless think pieces — and notable conservative anger — when he reflected, “this could have been my son.” George W. Bush felt the need in a post-presidency book to defensively insist that he hadn’t invaded Iraq to finish what his father started with Desert Storm.
With the coronavirus, Trump dropped his misleading comparisons to the flu after he saw the images coming out of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, where the sudden influx of corpses were put into makeshift morgues, and after learning that a longtime friend, real estate mogul Stanley Chera, was admitted in the intensive care unit at New York Presbyterian Hospital from complications due to Covid-19, the illness the novel coronavirus causes.
“When you send a friend to the hospital, and you call up to find out how is he doing — it happened to me, where he goes to the hospital, he says goodbye,” Trump later elaborated. “He’s sort of a tough guy. A little older, a little heavier than he’d like to be, frankly. And you call up the next day: ‘How’s he doing?’ And he’s in a coma? This is not the flu.”
Squirt, squirt, squirt, goes the squid/parrot. Let's see if he can discover another font. Wants other people to find his faults, but hedoes very well on his own. Let's see if he'll brag on his past again, maybe tell us about his best friend "Matt" Mathew Ridgeway, again. Bet he denies saying that!
Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.
Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.
Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.
“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.
“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”
This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.
For the most part, oft-maligned foreign leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have listened politely, turning the other cheek in the interests of preserving the broader relationship.
But Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.
Erratic behaviour, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It’s long been plain, at least to many in Europe, that Trump could not be trusted. Now he is seen as a threat. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.
The furious reaction in Germany after 200,000 protective masks destined for Berlin mysteriously went missing in Thailand and were allegedly redirected to the US is a case in point. There is no solid proof Trump approved the heist. But it’s the sort of thing he would do – or so people believe.
I knew he'd deny it. Lapides the internet never forgets.
This person is inclusive and loves all Americans.
"He's out in the West. He's [from] what is know in America as one of the "flyover states," places that you never want to go to, you just want to fly over. ..."
Several unnamed Rutgers University administration officials have told us that during his tenure a Professor Lapides apparently had an incident with a male student. Though not intimately aware of the details they said that the Professor would have certainly gone through homophobic counseling, but it seems to not been effective as it is reported by reliable sources the said professor might have been heard to utter the phrase "girly boy as he left the university premises in a hurried manner. Though refusing to be identified the senior officials did say that it certainly sounds like something he would do, as this represents a long standing behavioral pattern they have been concerned about.
"When I was at the peace conference ..."
Maybe, it happened?
The end of the American era has often been evoked, but the signs of crisis have never been as clear as they are now. Although the virus began its spread at a market selling exotic animals in Wuhan, China has become the first country to contain the pandemic. It is now airlifting simple, but nevertheless scarce products to the U.S.: fever thermometers, masks and protective gowns.
A Shift in the Balance of Power?
The airlift from Shanghai to New York is a gesture of solidarity, but also a deft PR move. The image of Beijing providing relief to the U.S. the way it would to a developing country is intended to demonstrate the shift in the global balance of power: The American patient is being cared for by the strict, but kind Chinese doctor.
The Americans’ urgent need for help is most visible in New York, the country's largest city, where hospitals are in danger of collapsing under the weight of the pandemic. "We are almost completely filled with coronavirus patients,” says Jonathan Marshall, the chair of the emergency medicine at Maimonides Hospital. It is Brooklyn’s largest hospital, with more than 700 beds. When Marshall calls by phone during a shift at the hospital, he sounds out of breath and is constantly interrupted by colleagues with questions. Marshall has worked nonstop since the start of the corona crisis in New York at the beginning of March.
Why is the disease hitting the city so hard?
When you speak to Marshall, it quickly becomes clear that what is most lacking is central coordination. According to a survey of its members by an association representing 42,000 New York nurses, around 85 percent have already come into contact with COVID patients, but almost three-quarters do not have access to sufficient protective clothing.
"We've had teams working around the clock for weeks now to source personal protective equipment,” says Marshall. He says he has tapped city, state and private resources. Has he obtained an assistance from Washington? "The Trump administration? No comment,” Marshall says. The hospital is currently spending several million dollars each month from its own funds to fight the pandemic. Marshall says it is still unclear whether the government will step in with aid.
The U.S. actually ought to be very well prepared for a pandemic. In 2018, almost 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product flowed into the health sector, a total of $3.6 trillion (3.3 trillion euros). But the American health-care system is enormously expensive and highly inefficient. The wealthy and people with good jobs often receive excellent medical care. But a lot of that money goes into the coffers of pharmaceutical and insurance companies.
That is now being exacerbated by political ineptitude.
I was indeed at the 38th parallel, flown up with others to help set up the American participation in the peace talks with N. Korea...I served at that place (later moved to another place) till I had completed my tour of duty and got shipped home...
Lapides obscuring his trouble at Rutgers, inflating his service record, refusing the help he so desperately needs.
Why don't you seek the help so many people over the years have urged you to get? Denial is not a viable cure for you.
"I was indeed at the 38th parallel, flown up with others ..."
"Then, one time, I go down and I'm walking along this ridge, a narrow ridge, and there was the whole commander of the whole shebang, Mathew Ridgeway, the Supreme Commander. ... In the background, you hear rifle shots going on,"
Doesn't seem to jive.
those who know, say nothing
those who do not know,mouth off with shit
I do note that stalker has reread my oral biography, put up for Vets from N.J. and online, so he can try to dump shit on me.
OK STALKER: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? WHERE AND WHEN DID YOU SERVE YOUR NATION? IF YOU CAN NOT ANSWER, WILL NOT ANSWER: THEN YOUR PARENTS HAVE RAISED A HORRIBLE HUMAN BEING WHO LIKE TO STALK, BADMOUTH, GOSSIP, PICK ON PEOPLE BECAUSE WHAT THEY HAVE RAISED IS A LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT, WITH FAMILY RESEMBLANCE
Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said Sunday that a New York Times report on the federal response to the coronavirus indicated that if some officials’ warnings had been heeded, “we’d be in a much better position.”
“If we’d acted on some of those warnings earlier, we’d be in a much better position in terms of diagnostics and possibly masks and possibly personal protective equipment and getting our hospitals ready,” Inglesby told Chris WallaceChristopher (Chris) WallaceChris Wallace: If Trump is seen as handling health, economic crisis well, 'I don't see how he gets beat' Public health officials warn of grim days ahead: 'This next week is going to look bad' Whitmer: Lack of national coronavirus strategy 'creating a more porous situation' MORE on “Fox News Sunday.”
“It’s possible we would have seen enough disease to get the will to do that in February, and, yes, the earlier we put in place social distancing, the earlier we would have gotten to a peak,” he added.
Inglesby told Wallace that despite some hopeful signs on the number of confirmed cases of the virus day to day, it was vital that the U.S. not be overly hasty in reopening parts of the economy.
“We are near a plateau in the number of cases. ... It doesn’t mean the downslope of the peak is going to be fast,” he said, adding, “I think it’ll be too soon to open the country on May 1,” although there may be parts of the U.S. that are ready for some limited reopenings.
“If we’re not careful when we ease social distancing, we’ll recreate the conditions that existed back in early March,” Inglesby said. "We need to be able to have the capacity so if someone says, ‘I feel like I’m getting a flu or pneumonia,’ they can walk into a clinic or a hospital or a testing center and get that test that day and get the results hopefully that day so they can be in isolation, so that we can identify their contacts.”
"That number’s going to differ from state to state depending on how they’re organized," he continued. "But it’s going to need to be a lot different than it is now."
So the counseling didn't help you. You talk like a clerk, or maybe a fighting typewriter.
He's found another font, he also has a rather high opinion of himself.
yo! dummy: it is same font but in italic
this is the font
for The Stalker:
26 Masturbation Tips And Tricks You'll Probably Want To Try
'There was a lot of pushback': Dr. Fauci admits lives could have been saved if America had shut down in February and NOT mid-March - but his 'recommendation' was not taken
The nation's top immunologist Anthony Fauci said Sunday morning that more lives could have been saved if Donald Trump lock downed the nation sooner
'There was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then,' Fauci said
Trump put out guidelines for social distancing and put the country on lockdown in mid-March
There are reports that Trump, however, knew about the threat of coronavirus long before he shut down the country
Things in your description were missing, such as General Ridgeway's entourage. What kind of plane you flew in such as a C-3.
What things that you noticed like Ridgeway's salute. It is amazing how some officers with scrambled eggs give a salute like they have arthritis. You notice things like that.
Or remembered dates like when you left Korea.
He doesn't want to talk about that stuff for obvious reasons.
See what I mean by the font.
Why worry about him, he's just a low class liar.
The ‘Red Dawn’ Emails: 8 Key Exchanges on the Faltering Response to the Coronavirus
By Eric Lipton
14-18 minutes
Experts inside and outside the government identified the threat early on and sought to raise alarms even as President Trump was moving slowly. Read some of what they had to say among themselves at critical moments.
Published April 11, 2020Updated April 12, 2020, 9:10 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON — As the coronavirus emerged and headed toward the United States, an extraordinary conversation was hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation.
Red Dawn — a nod to the 1984 film with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen — was the nickname for the email chain they built. Different threads in the chain were named Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, Red Dawn Breaking Bad and, as the situation grew more dire, Red Dawn Raging. It was hosted by the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Duane C. Caneva, starting in January with a small core of medical experts and friends that gradually grew to dozens.
The “Red Dawn String,” Dr. Caneva said, was intended “to provide thoughts, concerns, raise issues, share information across various colleagues responding to Covid-19,” including medical experts and doctors from the Health and Human Services Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Homeland Security Department, the Veterans Affairs Department, the Pentagon and other federal agencies tracking the historic health emergency.
Here are key exchanges from the emails, with context and analysis, that show the experts’ rising sense of frustration and then anger as their advice seemingly failed to break through to the administration, raising the odds that more people would likely die.
A Veterans Affairs official worried in January that the W.H.O. and C.D.C. were slow to address the spread of the virus.
One of the most active participants in the group was Dr. Carter E. Mecher, a senior medical adviser at the Veterans Affairs Department who helped write a key Bush-era pandemic plan. That document focused in particular on what to do if the government was unable to contain a contagious disease and there was no available vaccine, like with the coronavirus.
The next step is called mitigation, and it relies on unsophisticated steps such as closing schools, businesses, shutting down sporting events or large public gatherings, to try to slow the spread by keeping people away from one another. As of late January, Dr. Mecher was already discussing the likelihood that the United States would soon need to turn to mitigation efforts, including perhaps to “close the colleges and universities.”
A former Bush and Obama adviser compared the outbreak to major disasters in world history.
Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska who served in the White House under President George W. Bush and as an adviser to President Barack Obama, was also a regular participant in the email chain. He stayed in regular communication with federal officials as the United States attempted to figure out how to respond to the virus. From the beginning he predicted this would be a major public health event.
Experts worried that it would be hard to convince society to order restrictions like school and business closures to slow the spread.
Convincing governors and mayors to intentionally cause economic harm by ordering or promoting mitigation efforts — such as closing businesses — is always a difficult task. That is why it is so important, these medical experts said, for the federal government to take the lead, providing cover for the local officials to kick off the so-called Nonpharmaceutical Interventions, such as school and business closures. Again, this group of doctors and medical experts recognized from early on that this step was all but inevitable, even if the administration was slow to recognize the need.
The Diamond Princess was an early case study of how quickly the virus could spread.
Strong evidence was emerging as of mid-February — with the first cases of Covid-19 already in the United States — that the nation was about to be hit hard. These doctors and medical experts researched how quickly the virus spread on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined in the port of Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 3 before hundreds of United States citizens on the ship returned home.
Dr. Eva Lee, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who has frequently worked with the federal government to create infectious disease projections, helped the Red Dawn group do modeling, based on the virus spread on the cruise ship. (Dr. Lee is facing sentencing on federal charges that she falsified the membership certificate behind a $40,000 National Science Foundation grant for unrelated research.)
February was a tipping point for some experts.
The concern these medical experts had been raising in late January and early February turned to alarm by the third week in February. That was when they effectively concluded that the United States had already lost the fight to contain the virus, and that it needed to switch to mitigation. One critical element in that shift was the realization that many people in the country were likely already infected and capable of spreading the virus, but not showing any symptoms. Here Dr. Lee discusses this conclusion with Dr. Robert Kadlec, the head of the virus response effort at the Department of Health and Human Services and a key White House adviser.
Dr. Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.
This slow pace of action was confusing to the medical experts on the Red Dawn email chain, who were increasingly alarmed that cities and states that were getting hit hard by the virus needed to move faster to take aggressive steps.
A former high-ranking Trump official weighed in with criticisms.
When Mr. Trump gave a speech to the nation on March 11 in which he announced limits on flights from Europe to the United States — but still no move to curb gatherings in cities where the virus had spread — the experts on the email chain grew angry and fearful. Among those questioning Mr. Trump’s decision was Tom Bossert, who had previously served as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser.
Participants were angry the C.D.C. did not push for school closures.
The Red Dawn participants were even more upset when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in mid-March, questioned the value of closing schools, at least for short periods of time. Soon enough, governors ignored this advice, and most schools in the United States were shut. But it happened largely without federal leadership.
See all of the email exchanges.
The New York Times has collected more than 80 pages of these emails, from January through March, based in part on Freedom of Information Act requests to local government officials. Some of the emails were reported on last month by Kaiser Health News. Here is a fuller collection, arranged by The Times in chronological order. This file includes a list of many of the medical experts on the email chains. It also contains related emails from certain state government medical experts who were reaching out to the federal government during the same time period.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that calls to implement life-saving social distancing measures faced "a lot of pushback" early in the US coronavirus outbreak and that the country is now looking for ways to more effectively respond to the virus should it rebound in the fall.
"I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives," Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" when asked if social distancing and stay-at-home measures could have prevented deaths had they been put in place in February, instead of mid-March.
"Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated," added Fauci, who is a key member of the Trump administration's coronavirus task force. "But you're right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then."
News to stay informed. Advice to stay safe.
Click here for complete coronavirus coverage from Microsoft News
The comments from Fauci come a day after a report from The New York Times detailed the Trump administration's missteps in the early days of the pandemic and how President Donald Trump ignored his advisers' warnings of the potentially deadly disease.
An administration official separately confirmed to CNN that the government's top public health experts agreed in the third week of February on the need to begin moving away from a containment strategy and toward a mitigation strategy that would involve strong social distancing measures. The agreement among the health officials came after they held a tabletop exercise to game out the potential for a full-blown pandemic.
According to the Times report, Dr. Robert Kadlec, the top disaster response official at the Department of Health and Human Services, convened the White House coronavirus task force on February 21. During his meeting, the group conducted a mock-up exercise of the pandemic that predicted 110 million infections, 7.7 million hospitalizations and 586,000 deaths.
The group "concluded they would soon need to move toward aggressive social distancing, even at the risk of severe disruption to the nation's economy and the daily lives of millions of Americans," but it took more than three weeks for Trump to enact such guidelines on March 16.
Top doc Fauci admits lives could have been saved if US had shut down earlier – but there was ‘pushback’
Lucy Sherriff
5-7 minutes
WHITE House coronavirus expert Dr Tony Fauci said Sunday lives could have been saved if US had been shut down earlier.
Speaking on CNN, the immunologist said the US could start to reopen next month, but warned a second wave of the virus could still hit the country.
"We make a recommendation, often the recommendation is taken, sometimes it's not," Fauci said.
5
"We make a recommendation, often the recommendation is taken, sometimes it's not," Fauci said.
During the interview, Fauci revealed that the government had been advised to begin social distancing measures in February.
President Trump announced plans to roll out "self-isolating" in mid March.
"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."
Fauci told Jake Tapper "there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down" in February
5
Fauci told Jake Tapper "there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down" in February
Fauci was then asked if lives could have been saved if stay at home measures had started in February, rather than almost a month later.
"Obviously you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier you could've saved lives, obviously," he replied.
"No-one is going to deny that.
"But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then."
The US on Saturday overtook Italy for the most coronavirus deaths reported worldwide.
On Friday, there were 2,000 deaths in the US in just 24 hours.
There are now at least 530,830 confirmed cases in the country, and 20,614 deaths.
I hadn't noticed it before, but the whole troop transport thing is so innocuous that I had missed it before. Like what was the name of the C-3# that said person rode in. Back in that era all planes had names even transports like C-3's.
On Jan. 11, China shared the virus’ genetic sequence. That same day, the National Institutes of Health started working on a vaccine.
Ultimately, the U.S. was able to get China’s consent to send two people on the WHO team that traveled to China later in the month. But by then precious weeks had been lost and the virus had raced across Asia and had begun to escape the continent.
___
BALANCING ACT
For much of January, administration officials were doing a delicate balancing act.
Internally, they were raising alarms about the need to get Americans on the ground in China. Publicly, they were sending words of encouragement and praise in hopes Beijing would grant the Americans access.
Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, persistently urged more aggressive action in calling out China and sending teams there.
But while word of the virus was included in several of the president’s intelligence briefings, Trump wasn’t fully briefed on the threat until Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar called with an update on Jan. 18 while the president was at his private Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.
Trump spent much of the conversation wanting to talk about vaping; he was considering a new policy restricting its use. White House officials now believe Trump didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the threat to the U.S. in part because Azar, who was feuding with several members of Trump’s inner circle, did a poor job communicating it.
Azar was trying to walk a fine line between Trump’s upbeat statements and preparing the government for what might lie ahead. “America’s risk is low at the moment,” he later told House lawmakers. “That could change quickly.”
Subscribe to the Politics email.
From Washington to the campaign trail, get the latest politics news.
Moreover, the president was in the middle of his Senate impeachment trial and focused on little else, punctuating nearly every White House meeting with complaints about the Democrats out to get him, grievances he would continue late into the night on the phone from his private quarters.
Trump also had little desire to pressure Beijing or criticize its president, Xi Jinping, with whom he wanted to secure cooperation on ending a yearlong trade war before the reelection campaign kicked into high gear. When Trump fielded his first question about the virus in Davos, he enthusiastically praised Xi’s response, going well beyond the calibrated risk-reward messaging his aides were encouraging.
___
INFIGHTING
The West Wing was adrift.
By late January, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney held the post in name only as rumors swirled of his impending, post-impeachment departure. He was on the initial coronavirus task force, which was plagued with infighting. At the same time, the White House Office of Management and Budget was clashing with Azar’s HHS over money to combat the virus.
HHS wanted to send a special coronavirus funding request to Congress but the White House budget office resisted for weeks, insisting that HHS should instead repurpose $250 million of its existing budget to bolster the national stockpile by buying protective equipment. HHS, however, claimed that without congressional authorization it could not buy the needed quantities of masks, gowns and ventilators to rapidly bolster the national stockpile
Eventually, an initial request went to Congress for $2.5 billion in virus aid, an amount that lawmakers of both parties dismissed as too low. The bill that Congress quickly passed and Trump signed — the first of three so far — was for $8 billion.
No coronavirus cases reported at Colorado supermax housing El Chapo, Unabomber
David Matthews
2 minutes
The notorious prisoners at ADX Florence, one of America’s most secure prisons, are not catching coronavirus, likely due to their extreme isolation.
While “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynzki, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and several other infamous criminals are all housed in the same facility, there have been no coronavirus cases reported at the Florence, Colo. supermax prison known as “The Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
Those deemed the most disruptive and dangerous are in near-continuous solitary confinement in single-person, soundproof cells and are only allowed outside of their cells for individual recreation time for about seven hours per week. When they are let out of their cells, they are guarded by three-person teams, each of whom has been screened for coronavirus.
The prisoners inside this unit receive their meals in their cells, which also have toilets, sinks and showers, allowing for an almost total quarantine.
Coronavirus across America: Photos from every state show the depth of the crisis
Other prominent prisoners at ADX include double agent and spy Robert Hansen, the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and Al-qaeda cofounder Mamdouh Mahmud Salim.
Lot's of hoping and wishing Lapides. Only people who get angry have something to hide, isn't that right Lapides? You sure love innuendo, don't you?
Something that someone, who was not allowed to touch a coffee maker, would not ponder.
"Testing at a hospital in Chicago found that 30-50% of patients who have been tested for COVID-19 have antibodies in their system, which means they likely already had the virus and are immune, at least for an unknown period of time."
Post a Comment