Tracker

Trump would make a rabid ferret look like a stable genius.

The IOC will fight postponement to the bitter end. It is a private corporation owned and run by the former European royalty and it reaps many, many millions in profits for them.

Maybe, just maybe, the tide of opinion among the semi-sane right-wingers in the US is starting to turn. The fundamentalists are showing signs of realizing that they are being used by an amoral would-be dictator and now David Frum. Frum, the son of former media person Barbara Frum, has been an unquestioning cheerleader of the Bushes but now is turning on Trump and his cronies.

You may be underestimating the confidence the GOP and Trump have in the will of the police and military to enforce any edicts, legal or otherwise, that they see fit to mandate. A survey I saw a couple of years ago stated that about 25% of the US military rank and file and somewhat higher in the officer corps and police were strongly right-wing/fundamentalist in their views. This would probably predispose them to unquestioningly follow orders ("trust and obey, there is no other way"). The Kent State incident proved that most people, especially military and paramilitary will obey illegal orders when stressed. A sociology course I took examined the rise of fascism in post-WW1 Germany and apparently only about 20-25% of the German population were solidly behind Hitler's policies but were aggressive and vocal and the rest of the people went along out of fear and apathy.

Trump's stupidity and hubris will never allow him to admit mistakes or resign. He will try to find a scapegoat and demonize anyone who points out that the emperor has no clothes, and his followers will go right along.

And I have doubt that the chicanery will get a lot worse as the crisis deepens and the presidential election nears. Trump has no compunction about utilizing any means whatever, legal or illegal to remain in power and thus be afforded protection against prosecution. The craven GOP sycophants have supported the position that anything the president does, if he "thinks" it is in the public, good is legal.

Or when there was a sale on Crackling Rose'.

Technically, says Halper, Congress could delay the election for a bit in the case of an emergency, but when the president and vice-president’s terms run out on January 20, 2021, they are out of office, period. And in that case, it seems, the next-in-the-line-of-succession official who is still in office would be empowered to occupy the Oval Office. If, of course, there’s no general election in November, Trump and Pence aren’t the only elected officials out of a job, so crazy things could happen. While the Speaker of the House is third in the line of presidential succession, Nancy Pelosi is also up for reelection this year and so would face the same scenario as Trump and Pence if the election were to be canceled. The next in the line of succession who does not face voters in November is Chuck Grassley, the Senate’s president pro tempore. But then again, 23 Republican senators are up for reelection this year and would be on the sidelines as well, so we could have a Democratic Senate and perhaps a president pro tempore Pat Leahy (that position traditionally goes to the oldest senator of the majority party). Sorry, but it has happened before. Trump has managed to find pretexts supported by his lackeys to ignore many constitutional rules already.

He already has an exemplar- Bibi Netanyahu has hinted very broadly that he will stay on as Israel's PM in spite of his pending trial (and probable conviction) due to the COVID crisis.

There is a real possibility that Trump, with the support of the GOP, could use the COVID crisis to delay or void the pending presidential election in November. Given his utterances in the recent past and neo-fascist attitudes, it is not beyond reality.

Having a medical degree does not exempt you from being terminally stupid- remember that at Jonestown, three MD's fed poison to people, including their own children. That said, I would suspect that the mod there was full of bovine excrement in quoting what a doctor allegedly said.

More properly, he and others of his ilk ought to be referred to as "rasslers" not wrestlers.

Half of all coronavirus cases in New York state are in patients under 50 years old, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said as he pleaded with young people to stop socializing and to increase their social distancing. Of the state’s 10,356 cases, 54 percent were in people aged 18 to 49, Cuomo said on Saturday. “You’re not superman and you’re not superwoman, you can get this virus and you can transfer the virus and you can wind up hurting someone who you love or hurting someone wholly inadvertently,” he said. “It has to be stopped.” He said he would be visiting sites around New York state on Saturday to see if people are still out socializing when they shouldn’t be. A full lockdown order will come into effect on Saturday night. The Trump administration task force indicated earlier this week that, contrary to earlier assumptions that the flu-like virus mainly affected the elderly and those with underlying health conditions, information from Europe showed that some millennials were in ICUs with severe cases of coronavirus.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health has advised doctors to only test patients for the coronavirus if a positive result would actually impact their treatment. The department said in an official letter on Thursday that it was “shifting from a strategy of case containment to slowing disease transmission and averting excess morbidity and mortality.” The recommendation signaled a realization that there is little hope of containing the outbreak and came as a result of a growing number of patients and a limited number of tests. The decision could make it difficult to ever accurately determine the number of coronavirus cases in L.A. County, the country’s second-largest municipal health system.

‘I’m definitely going to get it. We all are,’ N.J.’s top health official says as she leads the state’s coronavirus war Nearing the end of another 16-hour day overseeing New Jersey’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Judith Persichillipauses at the door of her crisis conference room to answer a final question. Persichilli, the state health commissioner, has become a familiar face in the state as the woman who calmly announces how many people have tested positive and died of COVID-19disease each day. Behind the scenes, she is the health official who has been running the state’s day-to-day battle against the virus. But at age 71, Persichilli is squarely in the age rangethat experts are warning to be most cautious. “Are you worried,” I ask, “that you’ll get the coronavirus eventually?” She smiles. “I’m definitely going to get it. We all are,” Persichilli says matter-of-factly. “I’m just waiting.” It will probably be mild. She’ll feel sick for a few days, then hopefully get better, she says. It may not be this month or this year. But, she’s studied all the coronavirus pandemic algorithms and consulted the experts. It’s coming for her — and me. And you, she fears. The question now is how to best get New Jersey ready, she says.

To treat COVID19 as just another version of influenza is inviting disaster. As has been mentioned already, the full impact of it has yet to be determined and it can easily mutate into something a lot more virulent, and may have already done so. In New Jersey, a whole family of 5 became very ill and one of them died shorty after contracting it. In the following 2 weeks, a total of 4 have died and the remaining one is critically ill. This is not supposed to happen like this, as no predisposing factors have yet been identified and not all were aged. The more people who are infected, the higher the chances of mutation. As of yesterday evening,our infection rate here in Manitoba has held at 17 for 48 hours, and all but one of the infected are in their homes, so this is great news.

And he doesn't back down from BC Lions ex-quarterbacks, either.

WATCH: Dr. Fauci facepalms right behind Trump after he rants about ‘Deep State Department’ Written by Brad Reed / Raw Story March 20, 2020 Dr. Anthony Fauci was caught on camera putting his hand over his face during one of President Donald Trump’s rants about the “deep state” on Friday. While at a press conference about the coronavirus pandemic, Trump said that he would like to see Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “go back to the State Department — or as they call it, the Deep State Department — and do his job.” At this point, Fauci facepalmed even as Trump kept talking.

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta found himself shocked after watching President Donald Trump try to correct Dr. Anthony Fauci about potential coronavirus treatments. Shortly after the president’s press conference ended, CNN host John King highlighted Fauci shooting down the idea of using an antimalarial drug to treat the virus. “The information that you’re referring to [regarding the drug] is anecdotal,” Fauci said. “It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.” He then showed a clip of Trump undercutting his own administration’s top medical expert. “What the doctor said is 100 percent correct, it is early,” the president began, but then added, “I have seen things that are impressive, we’ll see, we’ll know soon.” King then brought on Gupta to ask for his reaction — and he didn’t hold back. “I’ve never seen anything like it, John,” he said. “That was incredible to see this back-and-forth. First of all, the president said that this drug was approved for coronavirus yesterday, it is not. He said there’s a lot of evidence to show how promising it is, there is a one 20-person study out of France that Dr. Tony Fauci described as ‘anecdotal.’”

The Trump administration has instructed state labor officials to not release unemployment numbers, in a clear effort to minimize the severity of the impact the coronavirus pandemic is having on the markets. The New York Times reports the U.S. Dept. of Labor “instructed state officials to only ‘provide information using generalities to describe claims levels (very high, large increase)’ until the department releases the total number of national claims next Thursday.” Gay Gilbert, the administrator of the department’s Office of Employment Insurance in an email instructed: “States should not provide numeric values to the public,” The Times notes. The U.S. Secretary of Labor is headed by Eugene Scalia (photo), who happens to be the son of the late Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.

During remarks at the White House on Thursday about the ongoing coronavirus crisis, a keen photographer for the Washington Post captured a revealing glimpse of President Donald Trump’s notes. The photo showed that, despite the fact that whoever typed up the comments Trump was to read had written the phrase “Corona Virus,” the word “Corona” had been crossed out and replaced by the word “Chinese.” Jabin Botsford posted the image on Twitter: The note appeared to be in a sharpie and written in Trump’s characteristic all-caps handwriting.

Cheeky.

Secret recording reveals top GOP senator privately warned of deadly coronavirus weeks ago — even as he kept the public in the dark Image via Screengrab. Written by Alex Henderson March 19, 2020 Three weeks ago in late February, right-wing media — from radio host Rush Limbaugh to Fox News and Fox Business — was full of Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump insisting that the mainstream media were exaggerating the threat of coronavirus in order to harm Donald Trump’s presidency (Fox, like Trump, has since shifted its tone). But it was also three weeks ago, on February 27, that Sen. Richard Burr, the North Carolina Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, was privately warning about how dangerous coronavirus was. And National Public Radio (NPR) has obtained a recording of Burr’s disturbing assertions. According to NPR’s Tim Mak, Burr addressed the COVID-19 threat at a private luncheon organized by a North Carolina group called the Tarheel Circle. And Burr, in the recording, is heard warning that coronavirus is “much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we’ve seen in recent history. It’s probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.” Burr’s comments, according to NPR, “raise questions” about why that private audience was getting a “a more frank assessment than the general public” was getting at the time. The recording, Mak noted during a March 19 appearance on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” was provided by “an attendee who became alarmed about Burr’s dire warnings” and “began to record.” Mak explained, “Sen. Burr warned well in advance that the coronavirus could be very destructive. A lot of the things he warned about have actually come to pass: 13 days before the State Department began to warn against travel to Europe and 15 days before the Trump Administration banned European travelers to the U.S., Burr warned those in that room to reconsider.” In the recording, Burr is heard saying, “Every company should be cognizant of the fact that you may have to alter your travel. You may have to look at your employees and judge whether the trip they are making to Europe is essential or whether it can be done on video conferencing. Why risk it?” In other words, Burr was giving the Tarheel Circle crowd the type of warning that Democrats and health officials were offering at the time — only to be demonized for it by Limbaugh and many of the far-right pundits at Fox News. “Morning Edition” said that it wanted to “be careful” about the “timing” of Burr’s Tarheel Circle remarks. Asked what Burr was saying publicly at the time, Mak replied, “Nowhere in press statements or other remarks did Sen. Burr provide warnings about how bad he worried the coronavirus crisis would become. I think what’s interesting about this story is that Burr was providing a stark assessment about coronavirus to a small audience of constituents — which as an elected official, he never told the general public. This story raises questions about whether Burr was truly frank with the public about how bad the coming weeks might be, in his opinion.” Mak added, “His comments at the luncheon contradicted the president’s then-rosy outlook. That same date, here’s what the president said about the coronavirus”: Burr, Mak noted, has considerable knowledge on biohazards and pandemics — yet when it came to coronavirus, Burr “didn’t speak out about his assessment” publicly in late February.