Tracker

Trump launches remarkably transparent effort to divide Democrats after Bernie Sanders bows outGage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)] Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams April 8, 2020 President Donald Trump wasted no time in attempting to create divisions between Democrats, calling on supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders to join the GOP less than an hour after the Vermont lawmaker announced he was suspending his campaign for president—leaving former Vice President Joe Biden a clear shot at the nomination. Trump said in a tweet after Sanders’ announcement that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was to blame for his failed campaign and said it all ended “just like the Democrats and the DNC wanted”—an obvious attempt to intra-party tensions. “This guy is nothing if not a skilled provocateur,” tweeted journalist Doug Henwood.

Where do you get the idea that Sanders was a Putin favourite?

I agree to an extent but there has to be more than a watered-down version of Trump to galvanize voters. Biden has all the charisma of a postage stamp and his voting record on progressive issues is much closer to Trump than, say, Elizabeth Warren's. Biden has been solidly supportive of Wall Street and big business, so the chances of him reversing the giveaways to these and hiking their taxes to something approaching rational levels is pretty low. Had the Democrats chosen Warren and Sanders, they would have been well positioned for the next ten years, but that moment has slipped away. They have opted for "safety" instead.

Trump's latest crime spree: With pandemic as cover, he's going for epic corruption Trump knows he's in trouble, and wants to fire everybody who might stop him looting the place before November. Donald Trump is on a search-and-destroy mission to remove anyone who might get in the way of him committing more crimes or using the federal government as a personal piggybank for himself and his friends. And he's using the coronavirus pandemic as a cover, knowing that both the media and Congress are too busy dealing with the crisis to prioritize Trump's obsession with maximizing his level of criminality and corruption. Last week, with the media preoccupied with rising death tolls and exploding unemployment figures, Trump fired Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for intelligence services, as a clear cut act of revenge against Atkinson for reporting the original Ukraine whistleblower complaint to Congress last summer. That complaint, of course, exposed Trump's criminal conspiracy to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a phony investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now certain to be Trump's Democratic opponent in the 2020 election. (Bernie Sanders officially suspended his campaign on Wednesday.) The result was Trump's impeachment by the House of Representatives, which should have led to his removal from office — if Senate Republicans weren't willing to sign off on any crime he wishes to commit. Trump described Atkinson as "not a big Trump fan, I can tell you," as if that justified firing an inspector general who fulfilled his legal responsibility to report a president's potentially criminal actions to Congress. On Tuesday, Trump removed another inspector general, Glenn Fine, who oversees the Defense Department. Fine was originally set to chair the committee that oversees how the $2 trillion in coronavirus relief funds will be disbursed. Trump would like to replace him with Jason Abend, a Customs and Border Protection official. This move, coupled with reports that Trump is appointing Brian Miller, one of his personal lawyers — who has publicly sneered at the idea that Congress should have the power to hold the executive branch accountable— as the special inspector general overseeing stimulus spending should make the president's intentions clear. As Democrats have warned, Trump clearly wants to treat the stimulus fund, which is supposed to mitigate the nation's economic collapse, as a slush fund for his rich supporters. One by one, he's eliminating anyone he perceives as an obstacle to that goal. During Monday's propaganda rally and/or press briefing, Trump lashed out angrily when ABC News reporter Jon Karl asked him about a report from the Health and Human Services inspector general that detailed Trump's massive failures to help the medical community deal with the onslaught of COVID-19 patients. "Did I hear the word 'inspector general?" Trump ranted. "Could politics be entered into that?" Translating Trump's incoherent ramblings isn't fun for anyone, but his implication was clear — any inspector general who wasn't hand-picked by him is motivated by "politics" and therefore can't be trusted. What HHS inspector general Christi Grimm had in fact concluded was that Trump's handling of the coronavirus crisis has been incompetent, which is about as controversial as observing that cats have whiskers.

Trump, Citing Hannity’s Show, Claims Things Are ‘Great’ With Ventilators CABLE NEWS PRESIDENCY Justin Baragona President Donald Trump told Fox News host and unofficial presidential adviser Sean Hannity on Tuesday night that he had learned partly from the prime-time star’s show just how “great” things are with ventilators and vital medical supplies during the coronavirus pandemic. Insisting that the nation is close to the peak of coronavirus cases, Trump said he “was right” that states wouldn’t need nearly as many beds and ventilators as originally thought. “In fact, we just saw your show and a couple of other people just reported back to me that everyone is in great shape from the standpoint of ventilators which are very hard because they were expensive and big and they are very high tech,” Trump declared. “But they are very hard to get and we are building thousands of them, and we have that in good shape.” As COVID-19 cases began to spike in New York and other states, governors began sounding the alarm on the need for ventilators and masks as hospitals began experiencing shortages. At one point, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state would need at least 30,000 ventilators from the federal government or other sources. Recently, California loaned 500 ventilators to the national stockpile in an effort to help harder hit states like New York, prompting Cuomo to express thanks as his state is still “beyond capacity.”

“The remedy should not be more harmful than the disease itself.” President Donald Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19 has drawn criticism from medical experts who say much more work needs to be done before anyone can say it’s effective at stopping the disease. And now one hospital in France has stopped its testing of hydroxychloroquine on COVID-19 patients over worries that the drug poses a “toxic risk” to people’s hearts when taken in combination with other drugs. French newspaper Nice Matin reports that Nice University Hospital “immediately stopped” its use of hydroxychloroquine in patients who exhibit “major risks” of suffering heart failure due to the drug. “When hydroxychloroquine is given on its own, the cardiac risk is very low,” explained Émile Ferrari, the chief of the hospital’s cardiology department. “On the other hand, the antibiotic (azithromycin) which is systematically prescribed in combination with hydroxychloroquine in the anti-Covid protocol also favors these anomalies. The cardiological risk is then potentiated… if there are other associated drugs which have the same undesirable effect.” Ferrari concluded that doctors should be careful and not view hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure. “It is true that Covid-19 kills, but the remedy should not be more harmful than the disease itself,” he said.

Sad to say that there is an understanding between dominant political parties that, when the ruling party loses an election and is replaced, there will be no investigation or prosecution of the outgoing party. And example of this was the lack of prosecution of Brian Mulroney despite all the allegations in "On The Take" book which detailed all the corruption in that administration. The author was never even interviewed. The only exception to this that comes to mind was the prosecutions of Grant Devine's flagrantly corrupt government when the NDP took power,

Top White House trade adviser Peter Navarro warned the Trump administration in January that the coronavirus could kill 543,000 Americans. He later raised his projection to 1.2 million Americans, but the president claims that "nobody" saw the crisis coming. Navarro sounded the alarm in late January that the virus threatened to cost the country trillions of dollars and infect millions of Americans in a memo obtained by The New York Times. "The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil," wrote Navarro, the highest-ranking official known to If the probability of a pandemic is greater than roughly 1%, a game-theoretic analysis of the coronavirus indicates the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel ban on China," Navarro wrote.

U.S. Intel Officials Warned White House of ‘Cataclysmic’ Virus in November, Says Report MISSED OPPORTUNITY Jamie Ross Reporter Updated Apr. 08, 2020 10:59AM ET / Published Apr. 08, 2020 8:52AM ET REUTERS U.S. intelligence officials warned the White House that the coronavirus outbreak could turn into a “cataclysmic event” as far back as November, ABC News reports. Concerns about what came to be known as the novel coronavirus pandemic were reportedly outlined in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence, and then briefed to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, and the White House. The report is said to have warned about a disease sweeping through China’s Wuhan region and posing a threat to the population. “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of ABC’s sources said of the NCMI report. The report warned of a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia, and indicates that the Trump administration could have ramped up containment efforts far earlier to prepare for the impending crisis. The Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence each declined to comment on the ABC report

U.S. Has Deadliest Coronavirus Day on Record: 1,800+ Lost GRIM REALITY Barbie Latza Nadeau Correspondent-At-Large Updated Apr. 08, 2020 5:55AM ET / Published Apr. 08, 2020 4:24AM ET The United States on Tuesday recorded its highest coronavirus death toll in a single day with more than 1,800 virus-related fatalities, bringing the nation’s death toll to nearly 13,000, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University. The numbers show the U.S. now has almost 400,000 of the world’s 1.4 million reported COVID-19 cases. Meanwhile, in Italy and Spain, which are the hardest-hit countries in Europe, encouraging data means that some lockdown restrictions could be lifted shortly after Easter. However, the toll in the U.K. continued to surge, with deaths now topping 6,100. The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the epidemic is believed to have started, was lifted from its 74-day lockdown on Wednesday. Read it at BBC News

According to a report from the Los Angeles Times, the federal government is quietly seizing supply orders from states and hospitals, leaving medical providers across the country wondering where the supplies are and where they’re going. “Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week,” writes the Times’ Noam Levy. “The Federal Emergency Management Agency is not publicly reporting the acquisitions, despite the outlay of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, nor has the administration detailed how it decides which supplies to seize and where to reroute them.” Read the full report at the Los Angeles Time

Pastor Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge spoke to TMZ this Wednesday, saying that if his church members die from coronavirus, they’ve done so in the name of religious freedom. Spell was charged with violating an executive order that bans churches from holding large gatherings, but showed his defiance last Tuesday by holding a service that was attended by over 1,000 people. Speaking to TMZ, Spell said that true Christians would be willing to die from coronavirus, adding that those who “prefer tyranny over freedom do not deserve freedom.” “The bible teaches us to be absent from our bodies so we can be present with the Lord,” Spell said. “So like any revolutionary, or like any zealot, or like any pure religious person, death looks to them like a welcomed friend.”

That is a frightening possibility, and if i t does happen, we will see a full emergence of a fascist state. And those Americans who either voted for Trump or did not vote against him will bear equal responsibility for that. If Trump loses, there is an equally frightening possibility that he will refuse to leave office citing massive voter fraud, and the Democrats do not seem to have the will to oppose that.

Anyone expecting sane pronouncements from an insane person will be disappointed.

I do not know how you can state that the people working on rolling out the program are immune from becoming infected with the corona virus. Anyone who might be showing the effects of infection will be sent home summarily so that they will not pass the potential illness along.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has pulled from its website some weird guidance telling doctors how to prescribe hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine—the anti-malaria drugs recommended by President Trump to treat the coronavirus. Reuters reports that, initially, the CDC site published dosing information for the two drugs based on anecdotal evidence rather than peer-reviewed science. Medical experts expressed their shock at the language, with Lynn Goldman, dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, reportedly saying: “Why would CDC be publishing anecdotes ... That doesn’t make sense. This is very unusual.” But the CDC website no longer includes that information, and now reads: “There are no drugs or other therapeutics approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to prevent or treat COVID-19.” It adds that “Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are under investigation in clinical trials” for use on coronavirus patients

An 86-year-old Louisiana woman and three of her sons who all tested positive for the coronavirus have died, their relatives confirmed. Antoinette Franklin, a lifelong New Orleans resident, and her sons, Herman Franklin Jr., 71, Anthony Franklin Sr., 58, and Timothy Franklin, 61, who are African American, all died within a 10-day period from March 20 to March 30. In Louisiana, 70.5 percent of those who have died from the virus are black, even though they account for only a third of the population. “My uncle passed, my grandmother passed, my dad passed, then my other uncle passed,” Anthony Franklin said. “It’s literally like seven to eight days apart. It’s horrific.” As of Tuesday, Louisiana had more than 16,284 cases of the coronavirus and 582 dead.

Any new initiative, private or public that is rolled out, will inevitably have flaws and misconceptions, and the bigger and more rushed it is, the greater the probability, almost certainty this will happen. Remember, some of the people who are tasked with this CERB are also likely to be stricken by the infection and this will make the process even slower and lumpier. It will be imperfect, guaranteed, and the Albert experience shows this. Lets not start warming up the tar just yet. This is little comfort to those affected, though.

It was announced that as of 6:00PM EDT, one million applications had been accepted.

Hours Alberta Premier Jason Kenney initially announced the benefit March 19, and opened applications that week. “Albertans are doing their part to keep each other safe and prevent the spread of COVID-19. We are doing ours by assisting Albertans and their families, protecting jobs and supporting workers and employers,” Kenney said. The one-time payment of $1,146 was open to Albertans required to isolate by public health guidelines or who had to take care of a dependent who was isolating, who also had a significant decrease in income and no other source of compensation. According to the province, the Alberta Emergency Isolation Support program was meant to “bridge the gap” while awaiting federal financial support in the form of the CERB. But over the past few weeks, many Albertans who went to apply for the benefit say they were faced with long wait times and denied applications for seemingly no reason.

Trump ridiculed, then minimized, then delayed the federal government’s response to the coronavirus for weeks. Then finally he wrapped his boastful, confused ego around reality. But Trump is actively pushing programs that will endanger more Americans. Here’s a brief look at Trump’s pro-contagion activities that leave Americans defenseless in the face of the virus, implemented by his crazed and cruel appointees. Trump is pushing hard to weaken safety regulations for nursing homes. Weakening these regulations leaves elderly residents vulnerable to infectious diseases, meaning more people will get sick and die. Trump is fanatically trying to end Obamacare in court cases. Twenty million people, at least, will lose health insurance. He has no replacement. As a Yale University study just demonstrated, 65,000 to over 100,000 Americans die every year because they do not have health insurance (see the Yale study here). Trump apparently is okay with many more people losing their lives to further entrench his cruel, corporatist ideology. Many more people will stay sick because they are uninsured and therefore cannot afford diagnosis and treatment. Trump is lying about his concern for American workers. Why is OSHA weakening workplace safety protections that keep workers safer? The answer: Trump is a crazed and cruel corporatist. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) henchmen are racing to weaken, revoke, or not enforce environmental safeguards for the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the food you eat. Certain scientifically condemned pesticides, for example, are in your food, but Trump and his EPA lackeys don’t care. These cruel minions are also taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis by signaling to polluters they can open up emission pipes and that the EPA will look the other way. Trump’s EPA is taking actions that mean more people will get sick and more people will die. Last month, Food and Drug Agency (FDA) announced that it is suspending inspections of foreign manufacturers importing food, drugs and medical devices into the U.S. through April. This decision is madness! FDA will even suspend inspections of Chinese labs producing large amounts of imported drugs for American patients.This is like telling corporate criminals that the panicked U.S. is unguarded without federal cops on the beat. More unprotected Americans will be at immediate risk of death and disease. Just last week, against the advice of even some major auto manufacturers, clenched- jaw Donald rolled back automobile mileage and pollution standards (See here the New York Times op-ed by Daniel F. Becker and James Gerstenzang on August 2, 2018). Trump’s mania knows no bounds! Trump’s compulsive crazy desire to repeal all Obama’s achievements means he is willing to move us backwards, making the future more dangerous and uncertain. The result is more life-destroying pollutants in your lungs, more consumer dollars spent on gasoline for less mileage per gallon, more climate crisis-exacerbating gases. Trump faces enormous opposition, from medical experts, consumer groups, environmental groups, civil rights groups, anti-poverty organizations, and even conservatives that will take him to court. What does he care? Stubborn Trump’s embargo of Iran and other severe sanctions on nations wanting to sell medicines and equipment to virus-plagued poorer locations disrupts international efforts to contain the deadly virus. Almost no reporters are asking Trump about his reckless, anti-safety policies in the midst of a pandemic that is especially dangerous for victims with pre-existing ailments and sicknesses.

Now Trump and his abettors believe that they will have unfettered access to billions to reward themselves and their supporters with no oversight. All of the investigations into Trump's illegal dealings have been suspended or slowed down due to being denied resources, so the table is tilted badly in Trump's favour. He has, with complicity of the GOP, been given power without any legal consequences, and has funneled millions into his resorts. why would he now think he ought to be cautious?