Wideleft

How can you claim they got it right when no one even knows whether people gain immunity after suffering their first infection while also ignoring one of the highest mortality rates in the world. The recent comparisons between people who are willing to sacrifice the old and weak for the sake of the economy with those willing to sacrifice school children to preserve the rights to own semi-automatic weapons is spot-on. The more worrying pandemic to me is ghoulishness.

None of this matters if ER's are overwhelmed. That is the whole point of shutting things down and physcial distancing. The death rate could be .01%, but if 100 million Americans get infected, they are f***ed. How do you replace thousands of skilled healthcare workers in the middle of a pandemic?

That's how Kenney's comms are spinning it too. I don't really see what the purpose of the clarification is. We know that most people don't die from COVID-19. What some of us fail to care about is that these jobs are so awful that only the most desperate work at them. So desperate that they come from other countries (and "worse" situations) and live in sub-standard housing and are held hostage by their workers' permits and their employers in a so-called civilized society. It's tragic that a 67 year-old Vietnamese refugee died when she should have been comfortably retired after 20+ years at the plant.

To those saying COVID-19 is less deadly than "they" are saying, they need to explain the excess deaths first. It is possible that more people are dying from COVID-19 than is being reported. Excess U.S. deaths hit estimated 37,100 in pandemic’s early days, far more than previously known By Emma Brown ,Andrew Ba Tran and Data reporter on the rapid-response investigative team Reis Thebault May 2 The United States recorded an estimated 37,100 excess deaths as the novel coronavirus spread across the country in March and the first two weeks of April, nearly 13,500 more than are now attributed to covid-19 for that same period, according to an analysis of federal data conducted for The Washington Post by a research team led by the Yale School of Public Health. https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2020/05/02/excess-deaths-during-covid-19/?arc404=true

Packing plant employees should all walk out if testing and PPE is not available. More than 370 workers at a pork plant in Missouri tested positive for coronavirus. All were asymptomatic (CNN)373 employees and contract workers at Triumph Foods in Buchanan County, Missouri, have tested positive for coronavirus. All of them were asymptomatic, according to a press release from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services. The state of Missouri has reported 8,386 cases and 352 deaths statewide as of Sunday night, according to the Health Department Website. Triumph, a pork processing plant, is located in St. Joseph, on the border of Missouri and Kansas. It is just one of dozens of meat packing plants and food processing facilities across the country that have seen outbreaks of the virus, forcing shutdowns and sparking concerns of possible food shortages. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/us/triumph-foods-outbreak-missouri/index.html

While China is far from blameless, Trump's efforts to pin all blame on them is ridiculous. Any proper pandemic plan would note that some countries would not be forthcoming with results in the introduction. Do we honestly think that the U.S. doesn't have a plan for a nuclear reactor meltdown that doesn't differentiate between possible reactions from Canada, Japan and Russia if they were to suffer the catastrophe?

The cruelty is the point. This is why he has the support of so many Republican senators and congressmen.

As much as I prefer Bernie to Hillary, this just isn't true. Yes, the primary process had problems, but the margin of her victory was large enough. Despite what social media suggests today, most people in those heady days of 2016 were still centrists and I suspect that is still the preference today, despite the rhetoric. Bernie Bros that either voted for Trump out of spite or sat out the election are either too stupid or too immature to realize that progress is slow when done peacefully and that the Republicans are more than willing to move things backwards. Bernie has successfully shifted policy discussion to the left and that is great. Democrats were afraid to label themselves as "liberal" less than 10 years ago, but now some are getting elected as Democratic Socialists. That's progress. I actually think that the U.S. can afford what he's proposing, but it's going to take a while to get there.

"... the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?" Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note. Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out. We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now." Martin Niemöller - Author of "First They Came..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

"No. Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It's not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it's the most dangerous thing." - New York author Fran Lebowitz when asked if this crisis has shown us anything about Donald Trump that we didn't know before.

New HHS spokesman made racist comments about Chinese people in now-deleted tweets ... "In a series of tweets on March 12, Caputo responded to a baseless conspiracy theory that the United States brought the coronavirus to Wuhan, China, by tweeting that "millions of Chinese suck the blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters." He followed up at another user, "Don't you have a bat to eat?" and tweeted at another user named, "You're very convincing, Wang."" https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/politics/michael-caputo-tweets/index.html

The article actually suggests that the bigger problem was created before the pandemic: “It’s been the great revealer, pulling the curtain back on the class divide and exposing how deeply unequal this country is.” The inability for the vast majority of people to survive a short economic downturn is a function of the system and not a bug. People can't ask for living wages if they have no job protection and they sure as hell can't save for emergencies if they barely make enough to get by.

And they need to be smaller and much more numerous for the sake of resiliency in the food supply.

There's more of the good French kind than the loony Canadian kind, though.

He really will go away if we all put him on Ignore. I have and I don't miss him at all. It's amazing how wrong someone can be on so many different topics, but that can only be by design. Plus, he's an admitted troll. His misinformation would be dangerous if anyone actually believed it, but I think this small group of people have him figured out and he doesn't add much to the football-related discussions either. So just ignore him already.

Have you ever given a speech so bad that it wiped out like a trillion dollars from the world economy? That's what makes Trump special. — Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) March 12, 2020

I think we actually agree, but it's Trump who thinks he's responsible for the markets when he's not. I don't think his literal incapacitation would be a really negative thing.

And who was the President when this happened? I don't think Warren Buffett is necessarily hoping Donny hangs on.

Part of me wants to find out.

Apparently, Trump is so unhinged he wants to fire the head of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell. So you tell me if he's a stabilizing factor.

I'll give you even odds that the market would actually recover a bit.

He is not a healthy man. If he has not been tested, he's going to end up worse than the Brazilian official.

I'm not sure Trump is smart enough to pass a virus test.

And what the Brazilian official said last night: "In a tweet last night, Wajngarten criticized early reports that he was being tested for the virus, saying he felt good. “In spite of the fact that the rotten band of press has already spoken absurdities about my religion, my family and my business, now they speak about my health,” he said. “But I am fine.” The presidential press office said Wajngarten is in quarantine at his home and will return to work only when there isn’t any risk of transmission." This is pretty rich with lots of foreshadowing thrown in for good measure.

Live updates: Brazilian official who met Trump on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago tests positive for coronavirus March 12, 2020 at 11:24 a.m. CDT A Brazilian official who met President Trump and Vice President Pence at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday has tested positive for coronavirus, though Trump said he “isn’t concerned” about the development. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/03/12/coronavirus-live-updates/