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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.

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