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Mrs Whiggins

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TornACL

TornACL 7686

Posted
Posted

One thing all this arguing about testing and ventilators clearly reveals is that there was no plan. 

And the blame for that falls squarely at the top. 

Arguing about the downwind effects of this blunder simply obfuscates that fact. 

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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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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32347

Posted
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I 'member when our President told us that Google was going to save us, or at least put up a website.

Now we find out Kush and his superfriends were going to try this:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/kushner-coronavirus-testing-oscar-company/609139/

 

Quote

On March 13, President Donald Trump promised Americans they would soon be able to access a new website that would ask them about their symptoms and direct them to nearby coronavirus testing sites. He said Google was helping.

That wasn’t true. But in the following days, Oscar Health—a health-insurance company closely connected to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—developed a government website with the features the president had described. A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request, an Oscar spokesperson told The Atlantic. The company even dispatched two employees from New York to meet in person with federal officials in Washington, D.C., the spokesperson said. Then the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.

 

Quote

The site would not have helped many Americans even if it had launched. Today, more than two weeks after the president promised a national network of drive-through test sites, only a handful of such sites have opened, and fewer than 1 million Americans have been tested.

The full extent of Oscar’s work on the project has not been previously reported. The partnership between the administration and the firm suggests that Kushner may have mingled his family’s business interests with his political interests and his role in the administration’s coronavirus response. Kushner’s younger brother Joshua is a co-founder and major investor in Oscar, and Jared Kushner partially owned or controlled Oscar before he joined the White House. The company’s work on the coronavirus website could violate federal ethics laws, several experts said.

 

 

Quote

For the past several weeks, Kushner has led a “shadow task force” on the coronavirus, separate from Vice President Mike Pence’s official committee, according to The Washington Post. Kushner’s team, composed of federal officials allied with Kushner and outside corporate executives, has met in the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. A senior official at that agency called Oscar to ask for its help on March 13, the day of Trump's press conference, the Oscar spokesperson said.

 

Spoiler

Kushner’s group has focused on expanding and publicizing coronavirus testing, especially at drive-through locations. Oscar’s website would have asked users if they were experiencing symptoms of COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus, and surveyed them about other risk factors, including their age and preexisting conditions. It also would have listed a limited number of testing locations nationwide, including some of the drive-through sites that Trump promised. It was designed to look like a government-developed product, provided freely by the Department of Health and Human Services to the American public. Oscar posted the source code for the site to Github, where The Atlantic reviewed it.

The site resembled a version of a tool Oscar had already built for its customers in response to the crisis, but it was “adjusted to meet the specifications and requirements set by the federal government,” Jackie Kahn, the Oscar spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. That Oscar had already been working on a coronavirus-testing website when HHS called to ask for help was a coincidence that had nothing to do with Kushner, Kahn suggested. She declined to say whether Oscar had discussed that site with Joshua Kushner or any board members or investors before Trump’s March 13 press conference.

Oscar donated its work freely and never expected to be paid for the project, Kahn said. The company is “not, nor has ever been,” a contractor or subcontractor for the government, she said, which would make it harder for the government to pay Oscar for its work. The work was “all at the direction of HHS,” she said. “The website never saw the light of day,” she added in an interview today.

That may not matter from an ethics perspective. The ad hoc nature of Kushner’s task force has already collided with federal laws. Oscar’s involvement deepens Kushner’s ethics and conflict-of-interest problems.

“It’s not typical. It’s usually not allowed,” Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University School of Law and an expert on anti-corruption law, told me.

Oscar’s relationship with the Trump administration could breach federal law in two ways, Tillipman and other experts told me. First, companies are generally not supposed to work for the federal government for free, though some exceptions can be made in a national emergency. “The concern, when you have some free services, is that it makes the government beholden to the company,” Tillipman said.

More important, she said, any Kushner involvement may have violated the “impartiality rule,” which requires federal employees to refrain from making decisions when they even appear to involve a conflict of interest. The rule also prohibits federal employees from making a decision in which close relatives may have a financial stake. Such a situation would seem to apply to Kushner and Oscar. In 2013, Jared and Joshua were the “ultimate controlling persons in Oscar’s holding company,” according to a New York State report that Mother Jones dug up earlier this month. When the elder Kushner joined the White House, he disclosed that he had been on the board of Oscar’s holding company from May 2010 to January 2017. He also said that he had sold his shares in the holding company for somewhere between $1.2 million and $7 million. Joshua still holds a stake in the company. When Jared joined the administration, he sold his shares to either Joshua or a trust controlled by their mother, according to his financial disclosures.

Kushner did not divest all the assets that he owned jointly with his brother when he joined the White House. Earlier this month, he sold his stake in Cadre, a real-estate investment firm that he owned with Joshua. The stake was worth tens of millions of dollars as recently as last year, Kushner said in his disclosures.

There was nothing wrong with Oscar’s arrangement with the government, Kahn argued. “This was the right thing to do, both legally and ethically, and if anyone has any doubt that COVID-19 is an emergency, he’s lost his mind,” she said. “We are enormously proud of our people who put serving the nation ahead of everything during this time of crisis.”

Oscar’s description of its work for the administration has changed over time. Two weeks ago, the company told Business Insider that it had “shared code” with the Department of Health and Human Services, but it did not disclose that it had actually made a website. Last week, Kahn told me in an interview that the company had merely “shrink-wrapped” its code, a piece of jargon that meant it had disconnected the code from its in-house technical platforms so that it could work on other servers. Her statement today admitted that Oscar had gone much further.

When viewed earlier today, the URL coronavirustesting.gov offered an Amazon Web Services error, suggesting that someone with access to the .gov domain had registered the website.

The Department of Health and Human Services declined to produce paperwork authorizing Oscar’s donation of the website work. “Multiple vendors worked on proposals, and we appreciate their work,” an HHS spokeswoman said. “Ultimately, Apple launched the new tool.” But Apple’s COVID-19 tool is a page on Apple.com, not a stand-alone government site like the one Oscar built.

Oscar’s creation more closely resembled the website Trump described on March 13. The site would “determine whether a test is warranted and … facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said, adding that Google had 1,700 engineers working on the project. Google, it was quickly revealed, didn’t have any such plans.

Google’s parent company is a major investor in Oscar. And Oscar, which has roughly 1,500 employees, did build a site like the one Trump described.

The White House declined to comment.

 

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Bateshorn

Bateshorn 9908

Posted
Posted
25 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

Just because Ben is a shameless grifter doesn't mean that he was not, at least at some point in his life, exceptionally skilled in his field.  The guy was director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.  

I know plenty of surgeons.  I wouldn't put them in charge of anything other than surgery. 

And let's be clear:  He's head of HUD because he's black.  Trump just assumes all black people understand public housing.  The fact that Carson either doesn't get this or is okay with that basic math is insane.

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28720

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, Bateshorn said:

And let's be clear:  He's head of HUD because he's black.  Trump just assumes all black people understand public housing.  The fact that Carson either doesn't get this or is okay with that basic math is insane.

Yup. He doesn't get HHS because he's a doctor. Black trumps doctor. So he gets HUD. 

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DigglerontheHoof

DigglerontheHoof 21081

Posted
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3 hours ago, zork said:

Trump said yesterday there had been over 1 million tested in the USA as of yesterday.  If that is true, with more positives coming from testing the last 48 hours before that announcement, it should be at about 250k positive tests.  That means roughly 70% of the testing is showing negative for Covid.  Is that a normal ratio given the well documented strictness with which the testing has being performed?  

The numbers seem to be even worse, wrt identifying who should be tested in Texas.

Not a big deal for sure but is it a bunch of hypochondriacs, overly zealous doctors, or what?

Because trump never lies.  JFC, you're an idiot. 

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29182

Posted
Posted
19 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

Instead of "lmao" could you make a coherent statement about your post?

nobody knows the details of a hypothetical phase 4, except that the right was pushing the absurd notion that "while the president was concerning himself with the workers, pelosi and her people were holding up phase 3 of the stimulus bill over climate change and other unrelated add-ons."  thankfully, given the source, nobody bought that nonsense.

 

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DixonHur

DixonHur 11236

Posted
Posted
22 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

My head would actually pop off at the prospect of that particular darkie cutting into my skull.

On a side note, is it just me, or does anyone else's mind go directly to this skit when they hear the word "darkie"?

 

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cactusflinthead

cactusflinthead 27595

Posted
Posted

There is no justification for not testing everybody. You shouldn't be able to get to town without passing one. Deploy the National Guard to start until the locals can catch up. Going to church? Here's your test. Going to Walmart? Lemme jab this swab up your nose as far as it will go. 

That's how it's supposed to be done. If they sold stock instead of getting the production ramped up to maximum rate and firing off the DPA order, that's on them. I'm not going to forget it. That fat fuck was playing golf. Shitheel Senators selling stock. 

And they won't admit it. Ever.

That's a nasty question. 

Those sorry nurses are selling them out the back door!

Pelosi is mean!

Fuck off. You failure of a human 

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Ghost of LL

Ghost of LL 15495

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23 minutes ago, Incredulity said:

She wants to reinstate the unlimited SALT deduction.

California has the highest State and Local tax rates in the country.

 

You need a drawing?

This notion that floats around that California has absurdly high state taxes while Texas is a low-tax state is absurd.  I got absolutely hammered by the cap on the SALT deduction.  So I celebrate Nancy Pelosi's entire catalogue on this issue.

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Bullneck said:

Instead of "lmao" could you make a coherent statement about your post?

You don't think it's funny that the top-ranking congressional dem proposed a rollback of SALT (something that would almost entirely be to the benefit of the rich) as a way to get more money into the hands of individuals?  That's pretty fucking funny.  

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jimmyjazz

jimmyjazz 45604

Posted
Posted
33 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

You don't think it's funny that the top-ranking congressional dem proposed a rollback of SALT (something that would almost entirely be to the benefit of the rich) as a way to get more money into the hands of individuals?  That's pretty fucking funny.  

I think it's funny that you never bother to look into the details.

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Doc Sam Beckett

Doc Sam Beckett 5785

Posted
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35 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

You don't think it's funny that the top-ranking congressional dem proposed a rollback of SALT (something that would almost entirely be to the benefit of the rich) as a way to get more money into the hands of individuals?  That's pretty fucking funny.  

No it doesn't "almost entirely to be to the benefit of the rich" 

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David Dennison

David Dennison 18683

Posted
Posted
35 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

You don't think it's funny that the top-ranking congressional dem proposed a rollback of SALT (something that would almost entirely be to the benefit of the rich) as a way to get more money into the hands of individuals?  That's pretty fucking funny.  

Her constituents live in California. She wouldn't be representing them very well if she wasn't proposing it. It's good politics.

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elfenix

elfenix 34190

Posted
Posted (edited)
6 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Mr. Martin is getting his ass handed to him this morning. 

imagine if sports reporting worked the same way as political reporting.  you'd have to find someone claiming the 49ers won the superbowl this year, get quotes from them, and treat them as a serious person. 

Edited by elfenix
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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted (edited)
11 minutes ago, elfenix said:

it's funny that this tweet is 17 hours old

 

How do you tailor action on SALT to focus benefits on middle class earners when a total repeal of SALT would provide hardly any benefit whatsoever to people making less than $500K a year?  Is the action tailored so that people making $50K to $100K save a few bucks while higher earners don't save any additional money?  Whoopy fucking doo.  

spacer.png

This is reminiscent of how Republicans try to frame the debate over the "death tax" as primarily affecting small farmers.  

Edited by Fozzz
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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, David Dennison said:

Her constituents live in California. She wouldn't be representing them very well if she wasn't proposing it. It's good politics.

I would agree with this and its illustrative of who her real constituents are (wealthy Californians), which is the problem.  

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

I assure you my wife and I don't make anywhere NEAR $500K and we got fucked by the SALT changes in the tax code.

I assure you some poor family farmers get fucked by federal estate taxes but you'd being a fucking rube to believe efforts to reform/repeal estate taxes are done so on their behalf.  Don't be a rube, jimmyjazz.  

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Longhorn_Fan68

Longhorn_Fan68 33852

Posted
Posted
26 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I think it's funny that you never bother to look into the details.

wait, you mean trumpers don't look past the headline? or look to see if the information they're spouting is actually true? that doesn't sound like someone who follows probably the most pathological liar ever to hold public office.

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Bullneck

Bullneck 19027

Posted
Posted
53 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

You don't think it's funny that the top-ranking congressional dem proposed a rollback of SALT (something that would almost entirely be to the benefit of the rich) as a way to get more money into the hands of individuals?  That's pretty fucking funny.  

I guess I'll have to do your work for you:

Quote

The federal tax reform law passed on Dec. 22, 2017 established a new limit on the amount of state and local taxes (SALT) that can be deducted on a federal income tax return. Beginning in 2018, the itemized deduction for state and local taxes paid will be capped at $10,000 per return for single filers, head of household filers, and married taxpayers filing jointly. The cap is $5,000 for married taxpayers filing separately.

Some states either have passed or are planning to pass new laws allowing taxpayers to make charitable contributions to government funds in exchange for state tax credits. If allowed, these creditable payments could enable taxpayers to effectively convert some of their lost SALT deductions to charitable deductions, which are generally fully deductible for those who itemize on the federal return.

State and Local Tax (SALT) Deduction Limit Goes into Effect in 2018

In prior years, taxpayers who itemized on their federal income tax return could deduct amounts paid for state and local income (or sales) and property taxes in full.

 

This was part of Trump's hate for MA, CA, NJ, and NY.  I live in NJ so going back to the way it was 2 years ago makes perfect sense. 

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Dbeasy

Dbeasy 14991

Posted
Posted
This is the assistant director of the WHO and this is why no one should give a shit what the WHO thinks.  (This also dovetails nicely into the post I made in the media bias thread about the New York Times writer who used this piece of shit as a source for why we should be handling this more like China.)  The guy clearly heard the question about Taiwan but wanted nothing to do with answering it.

 

 

The fact that you spend one second watching Tucker Carlson proves for the one thousandth time that you have no ability whatsoever to discern a reporter from a propagandist. Why is it that you simply cannot understand that every single word uttered from a propagandist is propaganda?

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Longhorn_Fan68

Longhorn_Fan68 33852

Posted
Posted
4 minutes ago, Dbeasy said:

 


The fact that you spend one second watching Tucker Carlson proves for the one thousandth time that you have no ability whatsoever to discern a reporter from a propagandist. What is it that you simply cannot understand that every single word uttered from a propagandist is propaganda?

 

I'll put this nicely: he's no Einstein.

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Bullneck

Bullneck 19027

Posted
Posted
29 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

Mr. Martin is getting his ass handed to him this morning. 

What is this beef about.  Also, how do you post actual tweets?
 
 
fm73L6jh_reasonably_small.jpeg
 
Oh and the health reporters like and #DonaldMcNeil are fantastic, as is their ed-board health guru . Both and have done great work on #coronavirus too. So not a 100% hater on the paper.
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pyrohornIII

pyrohornIII 4812

Posted
Posted

Go to the website in the tweet to see what all makes up the model.   This graph is based on social distancing only.   Shelter in place drops the percentages drastically from over 70% to 3% and 9000 deaths.   Total lock down goes to <1% and 1000 deaths.   Not sure of the length of these actions to get those results.

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BrickHorn

BrickHorn 18199

Posted
Posted
6 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

What is this beef about.

This article, apparently:

EUbpc91XsAEGITj?format=jpg&name=large
The Yale epidemiologist believes the headline and theme of the story are misleading and irresponsible.  He’s almost certainly right.  The media gives Trump’s bullshit waaaaay to much credit.  Trump is a liar.  He is a moron.  Every single word out of his mouth is either a lie or just stupid inaccurate bullshit.  Nothing he says should be taken seriously until it survives rigorous scrutiny; and only 0.01% of what he says will do that.  

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pyrohornIII

pyrohornIII 4812

Posted
Posted
7 minutes ago, Bullneck said:
What is this beef about.  Also, how do you post actual tweets?
 
 
fm73L6jh_reasonably_small.jpeg
 
Oh and the health reporters like and #DonaldMcNeil are fantastic, as is their ed-board health guru . Both and have done great work on #coronavirus too. So not a 100% hater on the paper.

go to the tweet you want to post.  Copy the address from the address bar.   Paste it into the text box.  Wait for it to open up, which takes a few seconds.   If you post before it opens in your comment box, or in your reply box, it won't show up.

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GreenspointTexas

GreenspointTexas 9568

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, pyrohornIII said:

Go to the website in the tweet to see what all makes up the model.   This graph is based on social distancing only.   Shelter in place drops the percentages drastically from over 70% to 3% and 9000 deaths.   Total lock down goes to <1% and 1000 deaths.   Not sure of the length of these actions to get those results.

That is correct, more or less for most of the US. Another reason why social distancing alone wont work

 

like i said a month ago, the govt dropped the ball so bad on this, all they care about at this point is herd immunity as fast as possible

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