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Mrs Whiggins

By Mrs Whiggins
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I'd just like to point out that neither myself nor any of my fellow nurses, fellow advanced nurse practitioners, and other healthcare providers ever swore an oath that we would lay down our lives for

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Welp, it finally happened. I snapped in public today. I went into work for a bit this morning because I’m trying to figure out the safest way to host physicians we are recruiting given our CV-19 sit

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I don't really know what to say anymore tbh. What happened last night is hard to put into words for anyone who hasn't worked in a hospital healthcare setting. Just unreal. Everyone is getting fucked.

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Neonmoon

Neonmoon 38129

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The top 3 countries in deaths. I wonder what they have in common

image.png.03955d968d73996f0dfea5e87ad8d21e.png

 

“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle – it will disappear,”  USA

“It's a little flu”  - Brazil 

“This idea that you can’t hug. You have to hug. Nothing happens.” - Mexico

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45981

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It's astonishing that there are literally dozens of high-level people in Washington who routinely grasp the issues at hand and lay them out clearly -- EWarren, TFauci, etc. -- and yet at the very top we are governed by The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight, and Wouldn't Want To Do So Even If They Were Able.

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Wanker Bob

Wanker Bob 379

Posted
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6 hours ago, Ted Lange said:

Fucking idiots

 

Live feed

https://sturgis.live/feeds/main-st-hd-way/

Zero masks.

Fuck these clowns.

 

 

Watched that feed for a few minutes and only saw 1 woman who looked like she may be attractive. I can't think of a big event I'd want to attend less than be there with those redneck goobers even on a normal year. 

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Skyline

Skyline 325

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How Germany Saved Its Workforce From Unemployment While Spending Less Per Person Than the U.S.

Quote

Instead of leaving employers to lay off workers en masse during hard times, and then have the workers apply individually for unemployment benefits, the German government subsidizes employers’ payrolls directly. Workers at a given firm or business agree to all work fewer hours, to spread what work remains among the whole staff instead of having some people laid off. But through government subsidies, they continue to receive a sizable share of their usual pay, as high as 87%, even if circumstances have them working few hours for the time being. When the economic crisis passes, they return to work full time, without the upheaval of losing a job and filing for unemployment on their own.

The difference in approaches has helped contribute to wildly different levels of economic fallout and social upheaval in response to the same pandemic. In Germany, the unemployment rate has increased from 5% to 5.8% from March to April. In the U.S., it surged from 4.4% to 14.7%.

I'm not just posting this because of hindsight but this is how it should've been done in the US, especially with healthcare insurance tied to employment. 

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Skyline

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Posted
Posted
35 minutes ago, BradInATX said:

Yeah but Germany's plan put no money in the hands of corporations or rich white people so it can fuck right off.

That's the part that's frustrating to me, and you. Nothing happens in this country unless you give govt money to some powerful industry. The ACA was like this, and covid relief bills were like this. Which is why significant change is really not possible. 

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FondrenRoad

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Posted
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4 hours ago, Skyline said:

How Germany Saved Its Workforce From Unemployment While Spending Less Per Person Than the U.S.

I'm not just posting this because of hindsight but this is how it should've been done in the US, especially with healthcare insurance tied to employment. 

Way better to just cut business owners a blank check and not have any of it trickle down to workers. 

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32395

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Nothing here that should surprise anyone, but as always, it's just mind-boggling to actually see it in writing:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-struggled-summer-coronavirus/2020/08/08/e12ceace-d80a-11ea-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_virustrump733pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

 

Quote

As the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows is responsible for coordinating the vast executive branch, including its coronavirus response. But in closed-door meetings, he has revealed his skepticism of the two physicians guiding the anti-pandemic effort, Deborah Birx and Anthony S. Fauci, routinely questioning their expertise, according to senior administration officials and other people briefed on the internal discussions.

 

Quote

Meadows no longer holds a daily 8 a.m. meeting that includes health professionals to discuss the raging pandemic. Instead, aides said, he huddles in the mornings with a half-dozen politically oriented aides — and when the virus comes up, their focus is more on how to convince the public that President Trump has the crisis under control, rather than on methodically planning ways to contain it.

 

Quote

During coronavirus meetings, Meadows has repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus that wearing masks helps contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, officials said. He has regularly raised with Fauci and other aides a range of issues on which he thinks Fauci has been wrong, and he personally monitors the infectious-disease expert’s media appearances. When he catches Fauci sounding out of sync with Trump, the chief of staff admonishes the doctor to “stay on message,” officials said — and he has impressed upon Fauci, Birx and other public health professionals that they should not opine on restrictions or make policy in the media.

 

Spoiler

In an interview Saturday, Meadows said he has been appropriately skeptical of information presented to him but disputed that he was anti-science.

“My comments to all of our doctors is that they need to stick with the science, comment on the science and do not become media commentators and opine on what may or may not happen,” he said. “I’ve been consistent from the very first day I was here. I want us to question every assumption that we make and rely only on the facts that are before us. When we are communicating to the American people, we need to make sure that any comments that we make are backed up by good modeling, good analysis and are free from commentary.”

Meadows is not alone in being skeptical of medical expertise, part of the politics-first, science-second attitude that has become pervasive inside the White House this summer — and which has been championed foremost by Trump.

“It’s one thing to question science, and it’s another thing to attack science,” said a former senior administration official.

If the administration’s initial response to the coronavirus was denial, its failure to control the pandemic since then was driven by dysfunction and resulted in a lost summer, according to the portrait that emerges from interviews with 41 senior administration officials and other people directly involved in or briefed on the response efforts. Many of them spoke only on the condition of anonymity to reveal confidential discussions or to offer candid assessments without retribution.

“Right now, we’re flying blind,” said Thomas Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Public health is not getting in the way of economic recovery and schools reopening. Public health is the means to economic recovery and schools reopening. You don’t have to believe me. Look all over the world. The U.S. is a laggard.”

Under mounting pressure to improve the president’s reelection chances as his poll numbers declined, the White House had what was described as a stand-down order on engaging publicly on the virus through the month of June, part of a deliberate strategy to spotlight other issues even as the contagion spread wildly across the country. A senior administration official said there was a desire to focus on the economy in June.

It was only in July, when case counts began soaring in a trio of populous, Republican-leaning states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and polls showed a majority of Americans disapproving of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, that the president and his top aides renewed their public activity related to the virus.

Meadows speaks during a briefing at the White House on July 31. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Some White House officials defended the administration’s response to the surge of infections in the summer, describing the current effort as all-hands-on-deck and saying that Trump is now heavily engaged personally and holds regular briefings. Aides express confidence that the United States is in a stronger position now than in March or April, with an improved supply chain for ventilators and personal protective equipment, and with advancements in therapeutics and in the development of a vaccine.

“While the media would rather speculate on palace intrigue with anonymous sourcing, President Trump and his entire Administration continue to lead a whole-of-government response to defeat the virus from China, expedite treatments and vaccine development, and reopen our economy safely,” White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement Saturday. “The President wants to see America healthy, prosperous, and again safely open for business, and that’s what we are all working toward.”

Trump and many of his top aides talk about the virus not as a contagion that must be controlled through social behavior but rather as a plague that eventually will dissipate on its own. Aides view the coronavirus task force — which includes Fauci, Birx and relevant agency heads — as a burden that has to be managed, officials said.

Yet the virus rages coast to coast, making the United States the world leader, by far, in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. An internal model by Trump’s Council on Economic Advisers predicts a looming disaster, with the number of infections projected to rise later in August and into September and October in the Midwest and elsewhere, according to people briefed on the data.

The forecast has alarmed the president and his top aides, even as some have chosen not to believe it, arguing that some previous projections did not materialize. Trump, meanwhile, has continued to insist publicly that the virus is “receding,” as he described it recently.

Skepticism of scientific projections abounds inside the West Wing. During an Oval Office meeting last month to discuss the Republican National Convention celebration planned for Jacksonville, where coronavirus cases had been surging, advisers informed Trump and other advisers that Birx had warned that they should be prepared for a large percentage of people potentially testing positive.

“Oh, if Doctor Birx says it,” Meadows quipped derisively, questioning the assumption that as many people would get the virus as she said, according to people in the room. The Jacksonville celebration ultimately was canceled.

Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, who chairs the coronavirus task force, and other administration officials both senior and junior operate with a similarly skeptical attitude toward the administration’s scientists, officials say.

These aides serve as Trump’s bureaucratic muscle, acting upon the views of a president whose public statements have revealed his ignorance of how the pathogen works, impatience with doctors’ recommendations and faith in a “cure” that could soon return life to normal.

Nearly seven months since the first coronavirus case was reported in the United States, there still is no national strategy to contain the outbreak — other than the demands, some of them contradictory, that Trump issues on Twitter or at news conferences. “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” the president decreed in a tweet on Monday.

As the nation confronts a once-in-a-century health crisis that has killed at least 158,000 people, infected nearly 5 million and devastated the economy, the atmosphere in the White House is as chaotic as at any other time in Trump’s presidency — “an unmitigated disaster,” in the words of a second former senior administration official.

In the weeks ahead, the administration plans to draw more attention to the push to develop and test a coronavirus vaccine, and to the government’s plan for mass distribution, together dubbed “Operation Warp Speed.” Aware that the public could view this as a politicized effort ahead of the November election, the administration plans to use public health professionals to promote the vaccine project and to limit the president’s personal involvement in the promotional campaign so that it is not viewed as a “Trump vaccine,” according to a senior White House official.

Trump’s new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, has argued that Trump and campaign surrogates should talk more forcefully about the virus to help reverse the president’s downward polling trend, according to a campaign official.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who has played golf with Trump throughout the pandemic, argued that the president could change voters’ minds about the administration’s handling of the crisis by more aggressively blaming the virus on China and stirring hopes for a vaccine.

“He has a better story to tell than he has told so far,” Graham said.

Over the past two weeks, the White House communications staff has worked with Birx, Fauci and other public health professionals on what they have deemed an “embers strategy” — a reference to snuffing out an emerging fire — to help prevent spikes in metropolitan areas that internal data project could see a rise in cases. Aides deployed the doctors and other experts to deliver stark warnings and reiterate best practices in local media interviews in an array of such markets, including Indianapolis and Minneapolis, as well as throughout the states of Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, which also happen to be election battleground states.

Trump, meanwhile, has tried to project an image of competence and control by resuming regular news briefings in which he reads from a script containing a flurry of statistics and other updates on the virus’s spread.

Trump’s recent performances have won plaudits from Fauci and others.

“I’m pleased that the president has gone out there and is saying things now that I think are important, that have to do with wearing masks, staying away from crowded places,” Fauci said. “Also, they’ve been short and crisp, which I think is good when you’re trying to get a message across.”

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R), a Trump confidant who also is a lobbyist for some hospitals, agreed. “I think his focus on encouraging the American people to wear masks, to letting them know that we are going to be in this for a while and we have to remain strong and resolute about it, I think are all things that are very, very important,” he said.

But several governors and mayors in some of the nation’s hardest-hit areas questioned the president’s credibility and the value of his presentations in recent interviews.

“You can be out front, but if you’re not providing accurate and truthful information, it can hurt rather than help,” said Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D), whose city has been a major hot spot. “Correct information is vital. People are listening, and they will respond based on what they’re hearing. And they look to their leaders at all levels of government. … That trust factor is critical. If you lose that, it’s very difficult to govern.”

Jack Chow, a U.S. ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration and a former World Health Organization assistant director general, said, “It’s extraordinary that a country that helped eradicate smallpox, promoted HIV/AIDS treatment worldwide and suppressed Ebola — we were the world’s leader in public health and medicine, and now we can’t even protect our own people from the most devastating epidemic in decades.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that Trump’s push for a speedy return to normal had deadly consequences. Asked who was to blame for the pandemic’s dark summer turn, Pelosi said, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“The delay, the denial … the hoax that it’s going to go away magically, a miracle is going to happen, we’ll be in church together by Easter, caused death,” Pelosi added.

In Trump’s White House, there is little process that guides decision-making on the pandemic. The president has been focused first and foremost on his reelection chances and reacting to the daily or hourly news cycle as opposed to making long-term strategy, with Meadows and other senior aides indulging his impulses rather than striving to impose discipline.

“Trump likes knocking down dominoes, and there’s nobody left to stop the cascade of dominoes,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director who has become a Trump critic but remains close to some of Trump’s aides. “He sits in the Oval Office and says, ‘Do this,’ or, ‘Do that,’ and there was always a domino blocker. It was John Bolton or H.R. McMaster on national security or John Kelly. Now there are no domino blockers.”

What’s more, with polls showing Trump’s popularity on the decline and widespread disapproval of his management of the viral outbreak, staffers have concocted a positive feedback loop for the boss. They present him with fawning media commentary and craft charts with statistics that back up the president’s claim that the administration has done a great — even historically excellent — job fighting the virus.

When “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace told the president during a recent interview that his claim that the United States had one of the lowest coronavirus mortality rates in the world was “not true,” Trump grew agitated and called for White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to hand him one of his charts.

“Kayleigh’s right here,” Trump told Wallace. “I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest mortality rate anywhere in the world.”

One question still dogs Trump: Why not try harder to solve the coronavirus crisis?

A senior administration official involved in the pandemic response said, “Everyone is busy trying to create a Potemkin village for him every day. You’re not supposed to see this behavior in liberal democracies that are founded on principles of rule of law. Everyone bends over backwards to create this Potemkin village for him and for his inner circle.”

One reason for Trump’s long-standing reluctance to wear a mask — although he sported one Thursday during a factory visit in Ohio — is the concern that his prized political base, which has held steady in its approval of him, is not enthusiastic about wearing them. That argument has been made several times privately to the president by Johnny McEntee, his former campaign “body man” who now directs the White House personnel office, according to two officials.

McEntee “loves to update the president,” as one of them put it, on what his voters are saying about issues, including the pandemic, and has spoken to the president at length about how his base does not trust some members of the task force or the guidance on masks or shutdowns.

Government health officials are wary of saying anything publicly — even if they are merely speaking truth — that might be construed as contradicting the president or countering his rosy assessments.

One of the clearest examples of how fear and loyalty have infected the response came in Trump’s decision last month to begin formally withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. Many government officials hoped the president would not take this drastic step, but none had the courage to try forcefully to persuade him against a withdrawal by explaining that doing so would risk damaging not only the global response to the virus but also the U.S. response.

“Everybody is too scared of their own shadow to speak the truth,” said a senior official involved in the response.

When Fauci was asked in an interview last week whether he would recommend voting by mail because of the pandemic, the doctor demurred because, he said, “that almost certainly is going to be used as a sound bite.” As many states ramp up their mail voting systems to provide options for voters who prefer not to physically go to polling sites because of the coronavirus, Trump has been claiming — without evidence — that voting by mail is susceptible to massive fraud.

“It’s a sport now in Washington to pit me against the president, and I don’t really want to do that,” Fauci said. “But someone will take a quote and, bingo, it’ll be me against the president, and I don’t want to do that.”

Birx recently showed what can happen when one speaks truth. Last Sunday on CNN, she said that the United States had entered a “new phase” of the pandemic with the “extraordinarily widespread” outbreak reaching into rural as well as urban areas.

Trump, who had been describing the virus as receding, complained privately for much of that afternoon and the next day that Birx had taken too negative a tone and should have focused instead on the states where case counts are declining, advisers said.

Trump took to Twitter to suggest she “took the bait & hit us” because Pelosi had criticized the doctor for her frequent praise of the administration’s coronavirus response. “Pathetic!” he tweeted, though a few hours later, he told reporters of Birx: “She’s a person I have a lot of respect for.”

In recent weeks, Birx had delivered versions of that message privately to state and local officials during her visits to various states that were in the White House’s “red zone” or at risk of slipping into it. Behind closed doors, she bluntly warned elected leaders seeing spikes that their states could quickly become the next Florida or Louisiana, according to officials in Tennessee, Mississippi and Ohio who met with Birx, as well as other people familiar with the discussions.

Rancor between scientists and Trump allies threatens pandemic response as cases surge

Birx’s private counsel at times stood in contrast to her decidedly less-alarmist public stance. Last week, for instance, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) gave her the floor during a meeting in Nashville. Birx skipped over pleasantries and told Tennessee’s leaders that they were at risk of encountering Florida’s fate if they did not mandate masks statewide and shut down bars, according to an official involved in the state’s response who learned of the discussions from two participants. A participant in another meeting with Birx and Lee that day also said Birx was unequivocal about the need for a statewide mask mandate.

But during a public news briefing with Lee, Birx hedged when asked directly whether her recommendation was that the governor require face coverings statewide, instead citing bullet points from a federal report. And Lee, left to characterize their conversations, claimed he had her backing for a different approach.

Gillum Ferguson, a spokesman for the governor, did not dispute the characterization of the private meetings but said Lee and Birx were in “broad agreement about the goal, which is to get more Tennesseans to wear masks.”

A White House official disputed that Birx had hedged in her recommendation of mask-wearing.

Local officials in other states said Birx took pains to provide off ramps even when issuing forceful recommendations. In Ohio, she advised the closing of bars but said another option would be to limit the hours of operation, said Mysheika W. Roberts, health commissioner in Columbus, Ohio, where Birx participated in meetings at the end of July.

“She comes across as very knowledgeable,” Roberts said, “but not pushy.”

Although Fauci, Birx and other medical professionals sit on the coronavirus task force, many of the more pressing decisions lately have been made by the smaller group that huddles in the morning and mostly prioritizes politics. The cadre includes Meadows, senior adviser Jared Kushner and strategic communications director Alyssa Farah.

The policy process has fallen apart around Meadows, according to four White House officials, with the chief of staff fixated on preventing leaks and therefore unwilling to expand meetings to include experts or to share documents with senior staffers who had been excluded from discussions. This breakdown in order, for instance, has given room for trade adviser Peter Navarro to push his ideas directly with Trump and to submit an opinion piece to USA Today attacking Fauci.

Asked to grade Meadows’s performance, Christie, who resisted Trump’s entreaties in 2018 to serve as chief of staff, said, “Incomplete, so far. … He’s still getting to know the ropes, getting used to everything, and working with this president up close every day is a much different experience than being one of his supporters on Capitol Hill. I’m sure the chief is learning that now.”

Health officials said they have been dismayed that there is no consistent message from the White House advising what people should be doing to help stem the tide of coronavirus infections, such as wearing masks and social distancing. Some internal administration models suggest that full adherence to those measures could yield the same result as the shutdown, and officials recognize that it would be better for the public health and psyche of the nation and the economy if the country could avoid another full shutdown.

Luciana Borio, a director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council during the first two years of the Trump administration, decried “a response in disarray hampered by a lack of clear, consistent public health-oriented guidance to the public.”

“It’s very difficult to know who to trust,” Borio said. “To expect the public to sort out the facts in a time of tremendous stress leads to inconsistent and disparate actions, and that really hurts our collective effort to fight the virus.”

What also has frustrated a number of the president’s allies and former aides is that he simply seems uninterested in asserting full leadership over the crisis, instead deferring to state leaders to make the more difficult decisions while using his presidential bully pulpit to critique their performances. He deputizes Pence to handle many of the actual communication with states and other stakeholders in the fight against the virus.

“If we want to return to school safely, we need not only adaptive safety practices at the schools but also lower amounts of virus in each community,” said Tom Bossert, a former White House homeland security adviser under Trump. “A suppression-level effort to shrink and not just mitigate the spread of covid requires a national strategy that includes standards and significant federal funding. Such a strategy is lacking right now.”

As the coronavirus crisis spins out of control, Trump issues directives — but still no clear plan

Trump has solicited advice on the virus from a medley of voices, with anyone gaining access to him able to bend his ear about possible treatments. The chorus includes Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham, who has paid regular visits to the Oval Office to discuss hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that Trump promoted as a cure-all for coronavirus despite scientific studies showing that the drug if used as a treatment could have deadly side effects.

The president recently hosted Andrew Whitney, a biopharmaceuticals executive on the board of a company called Phoenix, who met in the Oval Office with Trump. Whitney, who has a limited health background, pitched Trump on a botanical extract called oleandrin as a treatment for coronavirus, according to two senior administration officials with knowledge of the discussion.

This official said Mike Lindell, a Trump booster and the chief executive of MyPillow — who stars as pitchman for his product in advertising on some of the Fox News shows Trump watches — helped arrange the meeting. Since then, Whitney has personally made overtures to senior leaders at the Food and Drug Administration, including its commissioner, Stephen Hahn, in an effort to get the agency to approve oleandrin as a treatment for coronavirus.

The agency, which declined to comment, has not made any sort of approval. Whitney and Lindell did not respond to requests for comment.

“If people were left to their own devices, this would be the next hydroxychloroquine,” the official said.

Trump’s faith in hydroxychloroquine has inspired other Republican politicians to echo his enthusiasm, never mind the dangers raised by medical experts, putting a political gloss on what would otherwise be considered scientific facts.

Asked in an interview last week about the drug, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) acknowledged that he was not a doctor and had no medical assessment but added, “What’s strange about this is, in today’s political environment, everything is viewed through a lens of Trump. So, because Trump said positive things about hydroxychloroquine, suddenly a lot of the left, a lot of the media said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s the worst thing on Earth. You can’t prescribe it.’”

Since the start of the pandemic, the U.S. response has been plagued by a chronic shortage of diagnostic tests, the supplies needed to run them and the lab capacity to process them in a reasonable time to maximize their effectiveness, according to state officials.

The Trump administration has resisted devising a national testing program and instead ceded the task to state governments, even as cases of infection average more than 60,000 a day and some people wait 10 days or longer for test results, delays that render the results essentially useless.

State officials, leaders of the American Medical Association and other medical groups as well as some officials in the administration have pushed for a stronger federal solution to the problems of testing.

While some states have been able to largely meet the needs of their populations, the federal government is the only entity with the power to coordinate testing across state lines, push and enable manufacturers to increase production of test kits and supplies, surge those supplies as needed and ensure fair payment. Without federal coordination, states, businesses, hospitals — and soon schools and universities — find themselves competing with each other for limited supplies, often overpaying as a result.

To be sure, the government has succeeded in vastly increasing the nation’s testing capacity; there are now about 800,000 tests a day on average. But that is far short of the 5 million tests per day that experts said the country should be able to perform in the summer.

“Even if the government interceded much more aggressively on testing, there’s going to be a lag on when that increased manufacturing capacity might come to bear,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “We’d really like to scale up and have more effective contact tracing, and we’re challenged by the testing right now.”

Despite repeated calls to invoke the Defense Production Act to help resolve testing-supply shortages, the administration has resisted doing so. Trump and several White House aides have instead continued to think that it is politically advantageous to cede the issue to the states to avoid taking ownership or blame for the issue, even though testing shortages are largely seen as a federal failure.

“The thing that disturbs me is I think the public has to know it doesn’t have to be this way,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said. “Other countries have taken this virus seriously, trusted their public health officials and scientists, and now they’ve flattened the curve,” Pallone said. “Meanwhile, our situation gets worse and worse every day and some Americans think, ‘Oh, that’s just the way it is.’ But that isn’t how it has to be.”

Even Trump has taken to sounding defeatist at times, as he if had given up trying to save lives. When the president claimed in a recent interview for HBO that the virus was “under control,” Axios reporter Jonathan Swan interjected.

“How?” Swan asked. “A thousand Americans are dying a day.”

“They are dying, that’s true,” Trump said. “It is what it is.”

Some people familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is preternaturally averse to difficult challenges that don’t produce immediate results.

“He’s just not oriented towards things that even in the short term look like they’re involving something that’s hard or negative or that involves sacrifice or pain,” a former senior administration official explained. “He is always anxious to get to a place of touting achievements and being the messenger for good news.”

 

Edited by Francisco 2.0
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Doc Sam Beckett

Doc Sam Beckett 5793

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With the news of college football likely being canceled for the season, I poked around a few fan sites to see the reaction. The Georgia and Bama sites were about 85/15 before the threads were nuked with the 85% blaming the canceled season on "the media and liberals."

I know I know.....Georgia and Alabama message board fans.....but still, I'm fascinated by the idea that liberals and the media are responsible. How? How do they think liberals and the media are canceling college football in the south? Do they think covid isn't a big deal, the media is blowing it out of proportion and cities and universities are bowing to media pressure? What about liberals? 

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Aqua Buddha

Aqua Buddha 14598

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14 minutes ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

With the news of college football likely being canceled for the season, I poked around a few fan sites to see the reaction. The Georgia and Bama sites were about 85/15 before the threads were nuked with the 85% blaming the canceled season on "the media and liberals."

I know I know.....Georgia and Alabama message board fans.....but still, I'm fascinated by the idea that liberals and the media are responsible. How? How do they think liberals and the media are canceling college football in the south? Do they think covid isn't a big deal, the media is blowing it out of proportion and cities and universities are bowing to media pressure? What about liberals? 

They're like all other conservatives who see a vast liberal conspiracy yet the conservative party controls most every level of government.

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Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand

Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand 13585

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21 hours ago, Skyline said:

How Germany Saved Its Workforce From Unemployment While Spending Less Per Person Than the U.S.

I'm not just posting this because of hindsight but this is how it should've been done in the US, especially with healthcare insurance tied to employment. 

But how can those at the top feel good about their lives unless they're deliberately making the fellow citizens' lives shittier?

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32395

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1 hour ago, WhatTheBuck said:

Today was supposed to be the closing ceremonies for the Summer Olympics. Were the liberals and the media also responsible for the postponement of the Olympics?

Duh?

Keep in mind, these folks think the liberals and media in the US control everything everywhere.

 

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Gatorubet

Gatorubet 30247

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On 8/7/2020 at 5:51 PM, Mrs Whiggins said:

She gets it. These two right here.

 

 

This.

Biden needs to keep saying that Trump's failure of leadership on Covid is the cause of the economy being shit - and we can't get back to normal jobs and schools so long as Trump is in charge and failing to do anything about it.  More importantly, Americans are dying needlessly,  and many thousands more will have life long medical problems because of Donald Trump's failures.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat

 

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ultimaton

ultimaton 2982

Posted
Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, Doc Sam Beckett said:

With the news of college football likely being canceled for the season, I poked around a few fan sites to see the reaction. The Georgia and Bama sites were about 85/15 before the threads were nuked with the 85% blaming the canceled season on "the media and liberals."

I know I know.....Georgia and Alabama message board fans.....but still, I'm fascinated by the idea that liberals and the media are responsible. How? How do they think liberals and the media are canceling college football in the south? Do they think covid isn't a big deal, the media is blowing it out of proportion and cities and universities are bowing to media pressure? What about liberals? 

You can't use logic to decipher their thought process. It's an emotional thing. It's all about their feelings, if you will. They have to blame the left and media because otherwise there may be a moment of introspection that could lead some small part of themselves, buried deep within their hearts, to realize that they were not only wrong, but at least partially responsible because they voted for the guy that has fucked this whole thing up literally every step of the way. 

Edited by ultimaton
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washparkhorn

washparkhorn 9939

Posted
Posted
23 hours ago, Skyline said:

How Germany Saved Its Workforce From Unemployment While Spending Less Per Person Than the U.S.

I'm not just posting this because of hindsight but this is how it should've been done in the US, especially with healthcare insurance tied to employment. 

Third World nations, like the US, use despair, death and disability as a motivating tool. That's why they are Third World nations and not first world nations like Germany.

The nation made a horrible mistake obliterating the safety net. Those chickens are coming home to roost. The hollowing out of the middle class continues as it has since the 1970's. It is now reaching critical levels and the economic system that feeds the wealthy is breaking down rapidly. 

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-regressing-into-a-developing-nation-for-most-people

Quote

The richest large economy in the world, says Temin, is coming to have an economic and political structure more like a developing nation. We have entered a phase of regression, and one of the easiest ways to see it is in our infrastructure: our roads and bridges look more like those in Thailand or Venezuela than the Netherlands or Japan. But it goes far deeper than that, which is why Temin uses a famous economic model created to understand developing nations to describe how far inequality has progressed in the United States. The model is the work of West Indian economist W. Arthur Lewis, the only person of African descent to win a Nobel Prize in economics. For the first time, this model is applied with systematic precision to the U.S.

The result is profoundly disturbing.

In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector. Mass incarceration - check. The primary goal of the richest members of the high-income sector is to lower taxes. Check. Social and economic mobility is low. Check. 

. . . 

But who cares. Our nation's motto is, "I got mine and I don't give a fuck about anyone else."  

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12271

Posted
Posted
14 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

Third World nations, like the US, use despair, death and disability as a motivating tool. That's why they are Third World nations and not first world nations like Germany.

The nation made a horrible mistake obliterating the safety net. Those chickens are coming home to roost. The hollowing out of the middle class continues as it has since the 1970's. It is now reaching critical levels and the economic system that feeds the wealthy is breaking down rapidly. 

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/america-is-regressing-into-a-developing-nation-for-most-people

But who cares. Our nation's motto is, "I got mine and I don't give a fuck about anyone else."  

That article is not only accurate but horrifying. 

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BrazilHorn

BrazilHorn 6619

Posted
Posted

Welp - a decent number of those folks are going to get sick and die. Especially the older, fatter ones (which looks to be the majority)

Of course they will probably spread CV19 to a store clerk, hotel receptionist, waiter, bartender etc on their way back home.

Just unreal. People like this are absolute fucking idiots. Just an absolute joke. This is why we cannot have nice things.

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Bartles

Bartles 769

Posted
Posted

Well, sounds like college football will be officially called off in the next 48 hours. Get ready for an explosion of idiocy along the lines of Beruit last week. Small blasts from AL, GA and FL combine into a massive wave all the way to Cali.

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