Tracker

I would think that the next election will make the last one look tame by comparison. The GOP is busy setting up dummy websites and fake news outlets to spread their messages and also sources purporting to be Democratic which are spreading disinformation. The PCs here in Canada are starting to do the same.

NOT THAT THE DONALD WILL CHANGE BUT.... Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump's 26 year old daughter with actress and 2nd Trump wife Marla Maples, reportedly tested positive for the COVID-19 Caronavirus. That would be news standing alone, but Social Media is abuzz because she apparently tested positive last Saturday. The liberal media is out on force on this one, with any number of new conspiracy theories popping up.No comment as of yet from the President's daughter, although she has been active on Social Media in recent days.This is a reminder for us all though; The COVID-19 Caronavirus can get any of us.

Probably due to Inuit eating a lot of bean burritos.

DESPERATION TAKES HOLD...... Today I ran out of toilet paper and had to use lettuce leaves. It was just the tip of the iceberg. Tomorrow romaines to be seen.

TRUMP FORGETS HIMSELF AND TELLS THE TRUTH FOR ONCE! One of President Donald Trump’s surprising virtues is that, because of his lack of filter and his tendency for obliviousness, he is occasionally explicit about parts of Republican Party orthodoxy that more circumspect members avoid saying directly. And on Monday morning in an interview with “Fox & Friends,” Trump let slip a truth that has long been known but frequently been denied about the GOP: They prefer for fewer people to vote so they can hold on to power. He was responding to a question from a viewer who was concerned about “special interest projects” included in the coronavirus relief bills. Erroneously and mendaciously, Trump implied that only Democrats use big pieces of legislation to fund special interest items that they feel are important for their personal electoral chances. But then he slammed the Democrats for the reforms and funding they pushed to make it easier for people to vote in the wake of the pandemic. They had hoped to get $2 billion to fund this effort, but they eventually settled for $400 million, which experts believe is insufficient. “The things they had in their were crazy,” Trump said of provisions Democrats wanted in the legislation. “They had levels of voting, that if you ever agreed to it you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again. They had things in there about election days, and what you do…”

Not to mention the sunrises, oxygen and gravity. America is so blessed.

A Florida sheriff announced an arrest warrant for a controversial pastor on Monday, after the religious leader refused to stop holding packed church services amid the coronavirus outbreak. Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said at a press conference that Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne is wanted on charges of unlawful assembly and violation of public health rules after flouting social distancing orders at The River at Tampa Bay church. Howard-Browne—an ally of President Donald Trump—has been an outspoken opponent of social distancing requirements, claiming his church has machines that can stop the coronavirus and vowing to personally cure the state of Florida himself. “His reckless disregard for human life put hundreds of people in his congregation at risk, and thousands of residents who may interact with them this week, in danger,” Chronister said at the press conference. Howard-Browne did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

There is a real possibility that there may be successive waves of outbreaks over the next 18 months. Even though is is a flu variant, there are features of COVID19 that are unique and more surprises are sure to come. There is an unconfirmed report that two dogs have been identified as carrying the virus.

Nice, but it would have been really incredible if he'd spent his career with the Big Blue.

He sounds like a villain on Huckleberry Hound.

Trump's grandiosity compels him to believe that he can bully his way through any confrontation and he actually welcomes these. He believes that any public exposure validates his self-importance and infallibility. What the hell- its been working for him for 73 years, so why would he change that behaviour? The American media is so desperate for eyeballs that they are afraid to boycott these pressers.

Even this one? This is what happens when the inquiring mind of a scientist is combined with the sheer boredom of working from home. An Australian astrophysicist had to go to a hospital after getting four magnets stuck up his nose during an attempt to invent a necklace that stops people from touching their faces during the coronavirus pandemic. Daniel Reardon explained to The Guardian: “I thought that if I built a circuit that could detect the magnetic field, and we wore magnets on our wrists, then it could set off an alarm if you brought it too close to your face. A bit of boredom in isolation made me think of that.” Reardon tried clipping the magnets to his earlobe and nostril but admitted “things went downhill pretty quickly when I clipped the magnets to my other nostril.” The two magnets stuck together inside his nose, then he attempted to use his remaining magnets to remove them—but they also got stuck. “At this point I ran out of magnets,” he said. Reardon’s partner took him to the hospital that she works in “because she wanted all her colleagues to laugh at me,” he said. The magnets were successfully removed. Read it at The Guardian

Just over a month after proclaiming that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States would soon “be down to close to zero,” President Donald Trump said during a press briefing on the White House lawn Sunday that limiting U.S. deaths from the pandemic to between 100,000 and 200,000 people would mean his administration and the country as a whole did “a very good job.” Speaking as the death toll from the novel coronavirus climbed above 2,300 in the U.S.—which has the most confirmed cases of the virus in the world—Trump cited recent research warning that 2.2 million people in the U.S. could die from COVID-19 if the nation’s government and population take no action to mitigate the threat. “You’re talking about 2.2 million deaths, 2.2 million people from this,” the president said. “And so, if we can hold that down, as we’re saying, to 100,000—that’s a horrible number—maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100- and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job.”

And Trump's intelligence is to be found in none of them.

You are correct- it was Goebbels. Damned Oldtimers' disease.My memory is becoming like a rabbit's tail- short and fuzzy.

And Mozart is still dead, too. He's been decomposing.....

He is following Herman Goering's playbook- if you repeat a big lie loud enough and often enough, people will believe it. for a real education into the roots of American fascism, do some research into Charles Lindberg in the 1930's.

Then yer wimmin.

Can't blame Kenney entirely any more than Trump is completely to blame for the current state of affairs in the USA. They are more accurately symptoms than the causes- their followers and the passive rest of the voters who remain silent and inactive. We tend to get the governments we deserve and there are a lot of people in Alberta who are unwilling to accept that oil is no longer king and that the fat times in Alberta are gone for good. Petroleum demand was falling for several years before now and will never recover to the extent it was in the 90's and 2000's and woe betide the Alberta politician who says that out loud.

Progressive lawmakers on Friday evening denounced President Donald Trump’s intention to disregard provisions in the just-passed coronavirus relief bill that would provide crucial oversight of $500 billion in taxpayer money already poised to be a “Wall Street slush fund.” “This is unacceptable,” Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) said on Twitter Friday. Holy **** https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1243664170496688129 …

Blitzkrieg!

In shrinkology, we say that crisis bring out the best and worst in people- in other words, they become more like who they really are. This probably applies to systems as well, and we are seeing the true Donald Trump (as if we didn't know) and the true American political and healthcare systems and it is a damning judgement. What we have here is Canada is not perfect and probably never will be, but it is much, much better than the American healthcare system. All of the socialist, universal healthcare systems are faring infinitely better than those that are not universal. Cuba, for all its faults, has a higher life expectancy and lower natal mortality for both mothers and babies that the USA without all the expensive equipment and drugs available in the US.

The 38-year-old mother had experienced a complicated pregnancy, made riskier by Type 2 diabetes and a liver condition that causes bile to build up in the blood. On March 19, in her 37th week, she went to Columbia University Medical Center in New York City to be induced. Neither she nor her husband reported any of the worrisome symptoms that health care providers are watching for to screen for COVID-19, such as fever, cough, shortness of breath or sore throat. In fact, the woman’s temperature was slightly below normal, at 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, while the woman was in labor, her temperature climbed to 101.3. Suspecting that she had developed a potentially dangerous bacterial infection called chorioamnionitis, her care team gave her antibiotics and acetaminophen, which seemed to stabilize her. But labor was progressing slowly, and doctors decided to perform a cesarean section. As they were stitching up their patient, she began to hemorrhage uncontrollably. The team raced to intubate her, but her breathing rapidly worsened. When doctors finally had her condition under control, they decided to evaluate her for COVID-19. She tested positive. The woman, whose case was described in a short report published Thursday in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, is one of seven pregnant patients at CUMC in recent days who turned out to have the coronavirus. Two of those women had no apparent symptoms when they arrived at the hospital, only to deteriorate soon after giving birth; both required admission to the intensive care unit. CUMC is part of the NewYork-Presbyterian medical system, which announced on March 22 that it would no longer allow women who come to the system to give birth to bring in outside support to help them through labor and recovery — no husbands, no sisters, no doulas. Some 25,000 women give birth in the system’s eight maternity hospitals every year.

Trump’s Coronavirus Disinformation Campaign Isn’t Working: Poll TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE The president has presented an overly rosy picture about how the fight against the virus is going. A new poll suggests the public isn’t buying it. SAM STEINMar. 28, 2020 8:31 PM ET A clear majority of the American public, including self-identified Republicans, do not believe the disinformation that President Donald Trump keeps pushing around the spread of coronavirus. And even members of the president’s own party are skeptical of his argument that getting the country back to work needs to be as prioritized as public safety measures. A new survey conducted by Ipsos exclusively for The Daily Beast provides some of the clearest evidence to date that the president’s attempts to paint a rosy picture about the coronavirus’ spread throughout the country are not resonating beyond a small segment of the populace with a small exception for those who say they’re getting their information from Fox News. A full 73 percent of respondents, including 75 percent of Republicans, said that it was not true that “anyone who wants to get tested [for the virus] can get tested.” Just 17 percent said it was true. Only 20 percent of the public, and just 25 percent of Republicans, said that they believed a vaccine will be available soon. Forty-two percent said that was false and 38 percent said they did not know. Fifty-one percent of respondents, including a plurality or Republicans (46 percent), said it was false that the virus would go away on its own in warm weather, while just 13 percent said that was true. And 61 percent of respondents said that they believed COVID-19 was more deadly than the flu; with 22 percent saying it was about the same and 11 percent saying they believed it was less deadly. The question that seemed to generate the most confusion was on whether the Federal Drug Administration had “approved anti-malaria drugs to treat the virus.” But even then, 45 percent of respondents correctly identified that statement as false, 22 percent said it was true and 33 percent said they did not know. Collectively, the results present a portrait of a public that is sober minded about the coronavirus and unpersuaded by talk that life could return to normalcy soon. Over the past few weeks, Trump has suggested that the spread of coronavirus would abate as the temperature warmed. He’s repeatedly insisted that those who want a test can get one, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He’s downplayed the lethality of it by comparing it to the flu. He’s talked about a vaccine hitting the markets in weeks, if not months, and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a therapy for coronavirus, despite his own medical experts warning that there is nothing more than anecdotal data suggesting it could work. That Trump has had difficulty selling the public on these ideas suggests that he is operating from a trust deficit as he encounters the most existential challenge of his presidency to date. Though self-identified Fox News viewers were more likely to believe these claims than those who got their information from local news, national news or other cable channels, even they were skeptical of the president’s posture. Just 20 percent of those who watched the Trump-supportive cable channel said they believed anyone could get a test if they wanted to; just 31 percent said a vaccine would be available soon; and just 15 percent said the virus would go away in the warm weather. However, 44 percent of those who said they were getting their information from Fox News said that they believed the FDA had approved anti-malaria drugs to treat COVID-19, compared to 34 percent who said that was false. Fox News viewers were evenly split when it came to Trump’s most recent focus: getting American businesses back up and running on an expedited timeline even if it were to involve public health risk. Forty-seven percent of Fox News viewers said they agreed with the sentiment while 50 percent said they did not. But beyond that, the public was largely in favor of keeping public safety measures in place, even if it meant delaying a return to economic activity. Just 26 percent of respondents said that they agreed that “getting people back to work is more important than social distancing” while 69 percent said they disagreed. Those numbers were similar when isolating just for Republicans, with 57 percent disagreeing and 39 percent agreeing. Though the public may not be with him on his descriptions of and prescriptions for the coronavirus crisis, Trump has earned relatively positive views for his handling of the pandemic. Public opinion polls have consistently shown more people approving of the job he’s doing than disapproving. The Ipsos survey suggests one potential explanation as to why: self-identified Independents were relatively comfortable with the president’s push to start focusing on the economy. The survey found that 46 percent of Independents believed that the “cost to slow the spread of COVID-19 is too much for our economy to bear” compared to 39 percent who said they disagreed. Meanwhile, 39 percent of Independents said “getting people back to work is more important than social distancing”—the same percentage as for Republicans. A solid chunk of Independents (31 percent) even said that they believed “The media and Democrats are overstating the COVID-19 threat in order to damage Donald Trump’s presidency.”