Tracker

I was referencing your comments and probably rambling on for too long. The point I was trying to make is that we cannot rust right-wing governments who champion "small government" to do the right thing in protecting us. O'Reilly's comments are not as extreme as we might think and close to the Trump/GOP mindset.

On Fox News Thursday in discussion with Sean Hannity, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) made an extraordinary statement: That he wants the United States to “cancel” some of the national debt held by the Chinese government as punishment for allowing the coronavirus to spread beyond its borders. “I want to get the medical supply chain back in the United States, and I want to start canceling some debt that we owe to China, because they should be paying us, not us paying China,” said Graham. “So I think you’re going to see a bipartisan pushback against China to punish them so severely to deter them in the future.” Putting aside the thorny legal question of whether a foreign country can be legally held at fault for the spread of a deadly disease, there is a big problem with what Graham is proposing: the 14th Amendment. The amendment, one of the three “Reconstruction Amendments” passed in the wake of the Civil War, contained a clause at the end that was designed to prevent Southern politicians — who historically wielded outsized power in Congress — from canceling the U.S. war debt, which could have shielded the white landowners who led the war effort from having to pay taxes: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

O'Reilly's comments are the natural extension of right-wing thinking where its everyone for themselves and the devil take the hindmost. The Ayn Rand thinking is that only the fittest ought to survive and the value of the individual is only whatever benefit s/he offers to those in power. The problem is that is is no longer an even playing field, if it ever was. Leaving the individual to challenge the huge corporations in court or economics is pure insanity. Sane government is supposed to mediate between all of the competing and often conflicting demands of all the parts of a society to establish a dynamic, balanced compromise to protect the powerless from predation. When government is distorted as it is in the US or Russia or China, the individual is reduced to subservience.

Detroit Hospital Struggling to Manage Coronavirus Runs Out of Body Bags, Has Patients ‘Lying Everywhere’ Christian Hartmann/Reuters Medical workers at a Detroit hospital have described being at a breaking point during the coronavirus pandemic as they manage a flood of patients and scramble for resources. About five patients have died from the virus during each 12-hour shift at Detroit Medical Center’s Sinai-Grace and there aren’t always enough body bags or refrigerators for them, ER nurse Jeff Eichenlaub told The Detroit News. Patients are dying in hallways, bodies are even being stored in the sleep lab because all the morgues and refrigerated storage areas are full, and staff are sometimes too busy to let relatives know that a family member has died, he said. “Walking into work last Thursday, it was a war zone, there were patients lying everywhere,” he said. Another ER worker told the newspaper they were getting 110 to 120 coronavirus patients daily and didn’t have enough staff to deal with them. Hospital officials had a conference call with the CDC last week due to concerns that Sinai-Grace had the highest COVID-19 mortality rate among hospitals in the nation, staff were told Wednesday. Detroit has at least 6,083 confirmed coronavirus cases and 272 deaths. A DMC spokesman said there were a large number of nursing homes in the area surrounding the hospital and the spread of coronavirus among the elderly “places even more pressure on hospital resources as those patients are sicker and in many cases require ICU-level of care.”

Nichols gave the Bombers instant credibility and competitiveness, and we ought to be grateful for that, but whether it was his limitations or the lack of confidence of the coaches in his game, he just could not take the last step. We will have to see how well he does with his new team.

Trump is all about selling the sizzle but has no steak, and the Peter Principle has caught up with him.

Trump says he only gave Colorado 1% of the ventilators it needs after GOP senator asked for them Longtime Colorado Democrat "outraged" Trump gave fraction of necessary equipment as favor to vulnerable Republican IGOR DERYSH APRIL 9, 2020 4:08PM (UTC) President Donald Trump was accused of political favoritism in the administration's coronavirus response after only sending a fraction of the ventilators sought by Colorado's Democratic governor "at the request" of the state's Republican senator. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, has been pleading for the federal government to provide his state with 10,000 ventilators since last month. "Colorado's COVID-19 death rate is rising faster than any other state right now; the pandemic is spreading so fast that lags in testing are masking the true conditions experienced by Coloradans across the state," Polis said in a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the White House coronavirus task force. Not only did the federal government not respond to the request, but Polis also told CNN just days later the federal government seized an order of 500 ventilators bought by the state. "We can't compete against our own federal government," he said. "So either work with us, or don't do anything at all. But this middle ground where they're buying stuff out from under us and not telling us what we're going to get, that's really challenging to manage our hospital surge and our safety of our health care workers in that kind of environment."

Finally! It may have been posted here already, but the Trump White house has informed the media that they will no longer have access to Birx or Fauci unless they air Trump's "press conferences" in their entirety. Yesterday, MSNBC interrupted their live coverage when Trump once again lied about the efficacy of his "cures" that have been debunked and switched over to an epidemiologist who immediately contradicted Trump. It looks like most of the media are starting to develop spines, but Fox and OANN will ramp up their sycophancy in response.

O'Reilly just summed up the Trump/GOP philosophy.

All such decisions have to be assessed for intent. About 16 years ago, a design flaw in GM cars was causing the motors to stall even at highway speeds, resulting in many deaths. GM knew of this within months but did a calculation as to the cost of paying out victims vs the cost of recall and redesign, and came to the conclusion that it was cheaper to remain silent and settle the lawsuits as they arose while denying culpability. This eventually became public but no one was charged with criminal negligence or even fined. The chairman of GM resigned but he was due to do so soon anyways and left with a big payout.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who tested positive for the coronavirus roughly two weeks ago, has been moved out of the intensive care unit at St. Thomas’ Hospital after receiving oxygen support. “The Prime Minister has been moved this evening from intensive care back to the ward, where he will receive close monitoring during the early phase of his recovery,” Downing Street said in a statement. “He is in extremely good spirits.” The prime minister was hospitalized on Sunday and was transferred to the intensive care unit the following day. Read it at Twitter

If you want yet another measure of how serious health authorities are taking this pandemic, every province has already set or is setting triage criteria in the event the healthcare system is overloaded to decide who will get treatment. Scary but necessary.

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A ferret on crystal meth would look calm and competent by comparison.

Trump called it right when he said he could shoot someone in the street and his base would still vote for him. He, as all malignant narcissists, has no compunction in lying, cheating, or sacrificing anyone else to gain his ends. Adolph Hitler had the excuse of being a drug-addled meth-head, but Trump is wholly responsible for the death and division he is causing. He would have no hesitancy in advocating violence to his followers.

Yes.

Kamala Harris is a probable pick for VP but I do not like her track record on civil rights.

A right-wing commentator interviewed Jerry Falwell Jr. during his show Wednesday, where Falwell said that there were two arrest warrants open for reporters who came onto Liberty University’s campus. Upon further examination of the warrant, the police officer who signed the warrant was Detective/Sgt. A.B. Wilkins 206 LUPD. The LUPD is not the Lynchburg Police Department nor is there a Sgt. or Detective A.B. Wilkins. It’s the police department under the authority of Liberty University. Warrants are typically issued by a judge who directs an arresting officer to execute the warrant. No judge appears to have signed the warrant nor is there a judge mentioned, though the warrant does cite the Lynchburg, Virginia courthouse. The warrant also doesn’t appear to be certified by the clerk that it was submitted to the court. Clerks generally stamp documents when received. The accused reporters, ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis and a New York Times photographer Julia Rendleman were accused of trespassing on the campus. The warrant called it a “class 1 misdemeanor,” which, according to Virginia law “is punishable by up to 12 months in jail, a fine of up to $2,500, or both.”

I admit to being biased, but I believe that a Sanders-Warren Democratic ticket would have been overwhelmingly popular. This convergence of a GOP fool in the White House, economic downturn and health crisis may not come again for decades. There was a real chance for the US to have a decent minimum wage, universal health care and ecological sanity, but that moment is slipping away. The Democrats should be pillorying Trump and his pack of fools to point out how they are responsible for thousands of deaths and the onset of an economic collapse rivaling the dirty thirties, but they are largely silent,

Apparently this afternoon, the experts at Faux News told Trump that the worst is over all will be just fine real soon.

When you think of the logistics of providing a critical service to in excess of a million people spread over the second largest country in the world in two weeks, it is nothing less than staggering to do that from ground zero.

Sounds like calling MTS/Bell or Shaw.

Sanders has never been partial to Putin, so if this was done, it was to promote dissent and division within the Democrats.