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Passiflora
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 5:30 am |
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It's a given that Trump thinks everything is about PR and money, except for when it is about sex. He's a pathological narcissist. This is the man who literally wrote a letter of condolence to John Travolta was all about how much he'd wanted to bang Travolta's dead wife, because that was the highest compliment he could think of to pay a woman. It's the amoral profiteering ghouls he's surrounded himself with that I'm worried about.
Anyway, it is becoming clear that black communities have been hit disproportionately hard by this virus. There are stats coming out of several states and cities where 60% or 70% of coronavirus deaths are black people in places where they only make up 20% or 30% of the population.
They're the ones who are disproportionately still riding the bus to work every day in the supermarkets and Amazon warehouses, live in cramped apartments, and have more pre-existing conditions. It won't be long before some Fox News banshee finds some way to be racist about this, and I bet that several Republicans are sighing with relief that it's not their voters who are dying en masse. I can already see the weasel wheels turning in their heads where they're calculating that come November, their voters are going to be madder about the "Democrat Deep State Depression" than about the coronavirus deaths. (This may be catastrophically wrong, but I reckon they're thinking it!)
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 9:33 am |
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Give it a bit. A party reliant on baby boomers and war babies, largely men with lots of comorbidities, living in states with second rate public health infrastructure and who don't want to take this seriously? Even the official numbers show most of the red states are seeing exponential growth in cases right now. It's not gonna be pretty out in flyover country in a few weeks.
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Passiflora
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:00 am |
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It's gonna get bad, but however many old white Republican voters have to die before their elected representative get it into their thick heads that you don't play with people's lives, old black people are going to die in even greater numbers. They've got discrimination and poverty to deal with on top of bad public health infrastructure.
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 2:27 pm |
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That's the awkward part of this; much of Trumps base (poorly educated evangelical males) have the same basic social problems and health issues as the other more overtly downtrodden minority communities. They are the ones dying in the opioid epidemic and their life expectancy has been dropping for the last few decades. They just don't live in cities much so it's going to take longer for them to show the same patterns of mortality during this epidemic. Oh, and it turns out that the IG for EPA is thought to be no better or worse than any other, just now he's in a spot where he has to let things go by in EPA or let things go by with the emergency fund because it's all too much for one person. A win-win for Trump, it seems. And the CDC website decided to scrub some anecdotal stories about the benefits of Trump's favorite drugs. Without comment, the material which had been inserted right after Trump started shilling for the anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine was removed and replaced with an observation that clinical trials are ongoing.
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 11:28 pm |
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You may recall that Trump tried to make a great deal of fuss about actually using the Defense Procurement Act all of once in this crisis to get GM to make ventilators. Turns out the first of them will be delivered in August, in exchange for half a billion dollars. Granted that we'll have tens of thousands of them from other sources by June, but it's good to see that Trump's on the job.
And having admitted out loud that if people vote then the GOP loses, Trump's busy lying about in person voting fraud in an effort to commit yet more election fraud with the virus as an excuse. Hey, it's the Republican way. Though to be fair, when Dubya tried to find evidence of voter fraud they discovered that what little of it there was tended to be committed by Republicans too; the percentage of cases they were involved in was about half again their percentage of the electorate. Oddly enough Fox doesn't tend to stress that little truth.
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:26 am |
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Let's hear it for Democrats owning the House... According to HHS the national stockpile sent 11.7 million masks of the 3.5 billion estimated need to the states. That was it, there's nothing left but about a million needed for Federal personnel (presumably mostly military). And they weren't distributed by need; Texas and Vermont got the same number of masks. Meanwhile FEMA says the private distributors getting the masks the government is flying in aren't paying for the flights, and only need to agree to sell half of them to hotspots. Oh, and the total ventilators provided from the national stockpile? 7,920. The estimated need according to the survey of mayors (not including Seattle, New York or Chicago) is 139,000. And remember, the Feds won't be getting in any from the DPA until August.
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Passiflora
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 09, 2020 3:35 am |
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Weremensh wrote: That's the awkward part of this; much of Trumps base (poorly educated evangelical males) have the same basic social problems and health issues as the other more overtly downtrodden minority communities. Not as much as you'd think. The most enthusiastic Trump voters are those without college educations but with middle-class incomes. Electricians, cops, car dealership owners, real estate agents etc. The poor-poor don't vote for much of anybody, which is why politicians don't give a crap about them.
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:10 am |
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Fri Apr 10, 2020 11:33 pm |
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A look at who's organizing the American national response. Since that's the Washington Post, here's the takeaway... Washington Post wrote: Administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, say the White House has made a deliberate political calculation that it will better serve Trump’s interest to put the onus on governors — rather than the federal government — to figure out how to move ahead. Needless to say, red state governors are not highly represented among the folks picking up the slack. Honestly I find it impressive that Trump has once again proven that he has even more contempt for his base than I do. And they wonder why everyone thinks they're stupid.
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Sat Apr 11, 2020 4:14 pm |
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So what are the best predictors of failure to practice social distancing in the US? Oddly enough, no one in your county dying of it yet is only number 5. The top four are low education, voting for Trump, low income and climate change denial (the last two essentially tied for third). Surprising, isn't it? And another look at who cares about the folks in the cheap seats: Trump and his buddies in the Senate want to subsidize the oil industry by creating a cartel to raise oil prices, but don't want to help hospitals which are going bust. The epidemic aside it takes 65 times as much money to subsidize an oil worker as a hospital worker, but that's OK with the GOP because clearly it isn't employment or human welfare (or lives) that motivate them. Though a note on Trump: Fracking is extremely unprofitable and the states going to get hammered as the industry collapses include several he can't possibly get reelected without. The easy credit which let the industry go on drilling is gone now, and with oil prices extremely low there's obviously a zero chance of it coming back; so Trump's looking to raise prices again because it's all he's got. It can't work, but he's facing dying in a New York State prison if he loses reelection so it's straw clutching time. And a personal reflection: I've noted that Trump personally refused to allow anyone in his administration to help stabilize the Post Office, but sees nothing wrong with bailing out airlines; which probably reflects his views on how many people will be able to vote by air mail come November. He also threatened to veto the last aid bill if it had any aid for the Post Office in it, which got the $13 billion dollar grant in the bill turned into a $10 billion loan. Well he did note that voting by mail is bad for Republicans, and he is facing prison if he loses his office...and since all of the swing states already have universal no-excuse absentee voting regulations, killing the Post Office is what he's got left.
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Passiflora
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2020 10:12 pm |
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The Hong Kong government is bailing out the airlines by directly purchasing 500,000 air tickets. On top of other subsidies, buy-backs and waived fees.
If they start bailing out the cruise industry, I will get very stabby indeed.
It's only just occurred to them that maybe they should subsidize regular mooks too, but since we don't technically have an unemployment insurance system, this will take the form of wage subsidies to employers in exchange for not laying people off, pinky swear not to pocket it yourself and put your minions on indefinite unpaid leave...
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Mon Apr 13, 2020 5:46 pm |
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Having lied that he can force governors to reopen their economies, Trump announced his own reopening team. In a way it's perfect: every single one of them is completely useless here and has zero personal credibility even in their own fields (those that have one, anyway). What will be interesting, though: Trump wants to push back the Census for four months. Unless he can steal another term, that means the data won't be released until months after Democrats take over the effort. That could make falsifying the population to benefit the GOP tricky; since the Supreme Court is ultimately impotent to stop the new president from doing whatever they want with the data, including fixing the willful mistakes of their predecessor. Oh, and our Republican buddies in Wisconsin who tried to kill their state's voters in order to save the seat of one of their own on the local Supreme Court? They failed at the latter, though the state is tracking the voters who turned out in person to see how successful they were at the former. And it's wonderful watching Trump underline what a...well, his followers would call it a beta cuck...he is. Desperately flailing around and pretending he can tell the governors how they will be reopening their own states. What's he going to do, declare them to be in rebellion and send in the Army to force them to reopen movie theaters? Good luck getting the Army to agree.
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Passiflora
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2020 1:15 am |
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Nah, same playbook as everything else. Make absurd claims, intimidate his minions into backing up his absurd claims publicly, do absolutely nothing, and either pretend he never made said absurd claims or blame Democrats for his failure to implement them.
He runs on a very simple algorithm.
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weremensh
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 14, 2020 6:59 pm |
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This time he's blaming the WHO. Probably stealing their funding, too. Doesn't want the tired old lies to get completely stale, now does he? And just because, Trump on coronavirus testing in the food processing industry: Trump wrote: "Well, you’re asking that because of what happened — it’s a fair question, too — what happened in Denver. Because in Denver, I’ve never seen — I said, “What’s going on?” We’re looking at this graph where everything’s looking beautiful and it’s coming down and then you got this one spike. It’s — I said, “What happened to Denver?”
And many people, very quickly, and they — by the way, they were on it like, so fast, you wouldn’t believe it. They knew every aspect. They had people go and — not only testing, “Who did you see? Where were you? How many people did you meet? Were you out to dinner in somebody else’s home? Where were you?” Where did — where did this number of people come from? How did — they are totally on it.
Now, this just happened. I just saw it this morning. I’m looking at everything smooth, going down, topping out. And then you have this one spike in Denver. It’s like, where did this come from?
So we’ll be looking at that. And we don’t want cases like that happening. This was — but this — this is the kind of thing can happen. This is very complex.
This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it. And they’re constantly trying to come up with a new — people go to a hospital and they catch — they go for a heart operation — that’s no problem, but they end up dying from — from problems. You know the problems I’m talking about. There’s a whole genius to it.
We’re fighting — not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart. Okay? It’s invisible and it’s hidden, but it’s — it’s very smart. And you see that in a case like a Denver.
But, you know, I think we’re doing well, and they’re on Denver like you wouldn’t believe. I came in this morning; it was a flurry. I said what’s going on? They said, “Denver.” I said, “What happened to Denver?” Because Denver was doing pretty well. And they’ve got that under control. But, yeah, that would be a case where you do some very big testing." Mind you, he often isn't that precise. But now we know.
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Passiflora
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2020 1:29 am |
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I haven't been much of a fan of the WHO lately. Dr. Tedros has had his lips planted firmly on Xi Jinping's arse from the beginning. First they bought and repeated China's claim that there was no human-to-human transmission, then they downplayed the severity of the outbreak, then they joined China in criticizing other countries for implementing travel restrictions, which lasted right up until China implemented travel restrictions of its own.
But the US giving them less funding won't make it better. It'll just cede more influence to China.
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