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THE WISDOM OF TRUMP STRIKES AGAIN President Donald Trump’s Labor Department has quietly issued guidance informing most employers in the United States that they will not be required to record and report coronavirus cases among their workers because doing so would supposedly constitute an excessive burden on companies. The new rules, released Friday by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), were met with alarm by public health experts and former Labor Department officials who said the new rules are an absurd attack on transparency that could further endanger frontline workers. Because COVID-19 is officially classified as a recordable illness, employers would typically be required to notify OSHA of coronavirus cases among their workers. The Trump administration’s new regulatory guidelines state that—with some exceptions—employers outside of the healthcare industry, law enforcement and firefighting, and corrections will not be required to report coronavirus cases among their employees because companies “may have difficulty making determinations about whether workers who contracted COVID-19 did so due to exposures at work.”

APRIL 11, 2020 4:05PM (UTC) Encouraged by the pain, suffering, misery and distraction caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump is continuing his assault on American democracy and the rule of law. His most recent move: removing at least seven inspectors general who provide independent oversight within various departments of the United States government. Trump is a malignant narcissist with authoritarian tendencies and may well be a sociopath. Like a Mafia boss, he views personal loyalty as more important than loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law. Aided by Attorney General William Barr, Trump appears poised to loot the coronavirus relief funds passed by Congress, harass and silence his political enemies, speed up the country's downward slide into failed democracy, and unleash more cruelty against those Americans he deems to be insufficiently loyal or otherwise "undesirable." On Twitter, Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, summarized recent developments: Shaub is perhaps being optimistic: Donald Trump and his allies, both foreign and domestic, are already gorging on democracy. Trump makes no effort to hide his contempt for American democracy. He is obvious and unapologetic.

In a conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci last month, President Trump questioned why health officials couldn't simply let the coronavirus pandemic “wash over the country,” according to The Washington Post. In his desire to reopen the country as soon as possible, Trump reportedly wanted to know why the United States could not simply decline to take countermeasures against COVID-19, with an aim of reaching a critical mass of immunity faster. Fauci, reportedly aghast, said, “Mr. president, many people will die.” Public health experts agree that if the coronavirus is not contained, hundreds of thousands will die.

President Trump was told in late January about a memo from his trade adviser warning of the effects of the coronavirus, despite his claim later on that he had never seen the memo, The New York Times reports. Peter Navarro sent a memo on Jan. 29 alerting the president to the possible fallout from COVID-19: millions of deaths and trillions of dollars lost across the world. In April, Trump denied seeing it. But according to records and current and former officials who spoke to the Times, that wasn’t true, as Trump had been informed at the time about the predicted fallout of the pandemic. The denial was one in a long litany of ways Trump and his administration turned a blind eye to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Times. Public health experts have warned that the White House’s slow response and failures to plan for a pandemic will likely result in American deaths.

The weeks-long battle between religious leaders who have defied coronavirus lockdown orders and authorities trying to protect the public from spreading the deadly infection came to a head this weekend as members of churches around the country prepared for an unusual Easter Sunday service. The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. surpassed 500,000 on Saturday, yet some faith leaders said they planned to go against federal guidelines discouraging public gatherings of more than 10 people, while others in harder-hit areas worked to set up Zoom meetings and experimented with sound-mixing technology to combine separately recorded hymns. Governors in several states worked to balance the desire for adequate public health measures with the politics of asking citizens not to gather to celebrate the holiday. Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp have encouraged worshippers to attend online services. Though Holcomb has ordered Indiana churches to stay closed, Kemp has reportedly left the decision up to individual pastors in his state. In Texas and Florida, governors have exempted religious services from the states’ stay-at-home orders. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, the Reverend Tony Spell—who was charged last month for repeatedly violating a state ban on large gatherings—said this week that he expects 2,000 people to attend Easter Sunday services at the Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge. “Satan and a virus will not stop us,” Spell told Reuters, as he prepared for the Sunday service. “God will shield us from all harm and sickness.” (He previously told WMTV he did not believe his congregation was at risk of infection because he believed the virus was “politically motivated.”) Central Police Chief Roger Corcoran said in a statement in March that Spell had repeatedly failed in his responsibility to show “strength and resilience” during the crisis, choosing instead “to embarrass us for his own self-promotion.” “Mr. Spell will have his day in court where he will be held responsible for his reckless and irresponsible decisions that endangered the health of his congregation and our community,” added Corcoran. “We are facing a public health crisis and expect our community’s leaders to set a positive example and follow the law.”

Reports of COVID Survivors Being Reinfec Denis Balibouse/Reuters The World Health Organization said Saturday that it will be investigating reports from South Korea that the coronavirus has “reactivated” in 91 patients who were thought to have recovered to determine if there were testing errors or other anomalies. The WHO guidelines state that people are considered recovered from COVID-19 when they test negative twice within 24 hours, which usually takes place around two weeks after the onset of symptoms. South Korean health officials said Friday they are carrying out their own epidemiological investigations to determine the cause, which could be down to the patients not having fully recovered or taken extra time to shed the virus. “We are closely liaising with our clinical experts and working hard to get more information on those individual cases. It is important to make sure that when samples are collected for testing on suspected patients, procedures are followed properly,” the WHO said in a statement. “We are aware that some patients are PCR positive after they clinically recover, but we need systematic collection of samples from recovered patients to better understand how long they shed live virus.” It is currently thought that COVID-19 creates antibodies that protect anyone who has tested positive from contracting the virus again. Read it at Reuters

‘Unforgettable’ footage of endless car lines at food banks reveals the stark COVID-19 crisis in the U.S. Written by Eoin Higgins / Common Dreams April 10, 2020 321 Images and video of miles of cars lined up at food banks in San Antonio and other cities across the U.S. present a striking example of the economic effects of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, which has thrown at least 16 million Americans out of work in recent weeks and increased pressure on the distribution centers to provide key staples for a flood of needy people in the country. “Unforgettable image: thousands of cars lined up at a San Antonio food bank today, the desperate families inside kept safely apart,” tweeted CNN senior editor Amanda Katz. “Breadline, 2020.” On Thursday, San Antonio Food Bank creative manager Robert R. Fike posted a time-lapse video of the line of cars waiting to get supplies. “It was a rough one today,” San Antonio Food Bank president and CEO Eric Cooper told the San Antonio Express News. “We have never executed on as large of a demand as we are now.”

According to columnist David Lurie, writing for the Daily Beast, Donald Trump’s purge of inspector generals in the government is an attempt to make sure that he is not be subjected to any embarrassing reports or investigations before the November election. As Lurie notes, the president has enlisted former bodyman John McEntee, who was previously booted from the White House by former Chief of Staff John Kelly, to purge critics and those considered not loyal to Trump from their posts, and that inspector generals are at the top of the list. “In the midst of a deadly pandemic, Donald Trump has expanded his war on oversight by attacking the governments’ inspectors general, compounding the damage already done by his unprecedented stonewalling of congressional oversight investigations,” Lurie wrote, before adding that Trump and McEntee are dead set on “targeting IGs as part of a broader effort to purge officials who aren’t sufficiently personally loyal to Trump.” “That effort might help Trump delay any formal reviews of his failed leadership during the pandemic, or of his administrations’ disbursement of trillions in coronavirus-related spending, until after the November election,” he continued before highlighting the firing of Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general for turning over to Congress the whistleblower report on Trump’s attempts to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden. Adding that Trump’s “attacks on the government’s IG infrastructure have been so audacious that they have raised questions among at least some GOP legislators,” Lurie reports, “Additionally, Trump has taken a uniquely recalcitrant approach to congressional investigations. In the Ukraine matter, Trump defied long-standing precedent by refusing to voluntarily comply with nearly all congressional requests for information, and instructed current and former government officials to do the same.”

Plus, the CFL doesn't have Vince McMahon behind the scenes.

And an idiot left without adult supervision. Come to think of it, that applies to pretty much to Trump and the whole GOP, as well as some Democrats.

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.