Four years ago today (March 13th), then President Donald Trump got around to declaring a national state of emergency for the COVID-19 pandemic. The administration had been downplaying the danger to the United States for 51 days since the first US infection was confirmed on January 22nd.

From an ABC News article dated 25 February 2020...

CDC warns Americans of 'significant disruption' from coronavirus

Until now, health officials said they'd hoped to prevent community spread in the United States. But following community transmissions in Italy, Iran and South Korea, health officials believe the virus may not be able to be contained at the border and that Americans should prepare for a "significant disruption." This comes in contrast to statements from the Trump administration. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf said Tuesday the threat to the United States from coronavirus "remains low," despite the White House seeking $1.25 billion in emergency funding to combat the virus. Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told CNBC’s Kelly Evans on “The Exchange” Tuesday evening, "We have contained the virus very well here in the U.S." [ ... ] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the request "long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency." She also accused President Trump of leaving "critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant." "The president's most recent budget called for slashing funding for the Centers for Disease Control, which is on the front lines of this emergency. And now, he is compounding our vulnerabilities by seeking to ransack funds still needed to keep Ebola in check," Pelosi said in a statement Tuesday morning. "Our state and local governments need serious funding to be ready to respond effectively to any outbreak in the United States. The president should not be raiding money that Congress has appropriated for other life-or-death public health priorities." She added that lawmakers in the House of Representatives "will swiftly advance a strong, strategic funding package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis." Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also called the Trump administration's request "too little too late." "That President Trump is trying to steal funds dedicated to fight Ebola -- which is still considered an epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- is indicative of his towering incompetence and further proof that he and his administration aren't taking the coronavirus crisis as seriously as they need to be," Schumer said in a statement.

A reminder that Trump had been leaving many positions vacant – part of a Republican strategy to undermine the federal government.

Here's a picture from that ABC piece from a nearly empty restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The screen displays a Trump tweet still downplaying COVID-19 with him seeming more concerned about the effect of the Dow Jones on his re-election bid.

People were not buying Trump's claims but they were buying PPE.

I took this picture at CVS on February 26th that year.

The stock market which Trump in his February tweet claimed looked "very good" was tanking on March 12th – the day before his state of emergency declaration.

Trump succeeded in sending the US economy into recession much faster than George W. Bush did at the end of his term – quite a feat!. (As an aside, every recession in the US since 1981 has been triggered by Republican presidents.)

Of course Trump never stopped trying to downplay the pandemic nor did he ever take responsibility for it. The US ended up with the highest per capita death rate of any technologically advanced country.

Precious time was lost while Trump dawdled. Orange on this map indicates COVID infections while red indicates COVID deaths. At the time Trump declared a state of emergency, the virus had already spread to 49 states.

The United States could have done far better and it had the tools to do so.

The Obama administration had limited the number of US cases of Ebola to under one dozen during that pandemic in the 2010s. Based on their success, they compiled a guide on how the federal government could limit future pandemics.

Obama team left pandemic playbook for Trump administration, officials confirm

Of course Trump ignored it.

Unlike those boxes of nuclear secrets in Trump's bathroom, the Obama pandemic limitation document is not classified. Anybody can read it – even if Trump didn't. This copy comes from the Stanford University Libraries.

TOWARDS EPIDEMIC PREDICTION: FEDERAL EFFORTS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN OUTBREAK MODELING

Feel free to share this post with anybody who still feels nostalgic about the Trump White House years!

Biden’s team, and Biden himself, stopped engaging in non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), with the president hosting a maskless State of the Union. While sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine, and while passing the largest military budget ever—for more than $800 billion, clocking in at tens of billions more than Trump’s administration had ever asked for—Biden and the Democratic-controlled congress failed to pass their last $15 billion COVID spending bill. This means that people without insurance can no longer receive free testing or treatment for COVID-19, despite the fact that they are more likely to get, become seriously sick from, and die from it.

This result has been deadly. While 400,000 people in the U.S. died under Trump, more than 600,000 have died since under Biden.

Which means that for every two people who died under Trump, more than three have died under Biden.

[...]

As soon as Biden assumed office, many establishment liberals and much of the mainstream media—who are unable to think outside of a “Democrats good, Republicans bad” binary—stopped caring about the pandemic. Also, on behalf of their corporate owners, many newsrooms actively pushed for a “return to normal.” And, as I argue in my forthcoming book, regardless of which party is running the U.S. government, there are multiple ways America perpetually creates what I call a “viral underclass.” But for many journalists, it was easier to view Trump as an abnormal monster who made the pandemic so bad, rather than to wrestle with how it is our American way of life that initially made the pandemic more deadly in the U.S. than in any other country on earth, and which continues to make us have the most deaths of any nation.

When Biden became president, the death rates did drop as mass vaccination took off, but he and the Democrats have asked for too much of vaccines and have failed on many other fronts, including failing to pay people to isolate for 10 days (and to be paid to rest and recover for longer if needed); failing to upgrade ventilation in public spaces (while urging local governments to spend federal COVID money hiring more police); and failing to pay for the uninsured to get tested and treated. Even when a federal judge appointed by Trump rescinded the CDC’s order that people had to be masked on public transportation, the Biden White House failed to fight it or even ask for an emergency injunction while they appealed the ruling.

[...]

Meanwhile, the vaccination apparatus the U.S. put together with spit, tape, prayer, and the volunteer labor of millions has been passively and actively dismantled, allowing us to slowly become an unvaccinated nation. For vaccines wane, and over time, being unboosted equals being unvaccinated. By December 2021, only 30% of the nation had been boosted; thus, because vaccines’ power and the use of NPIs were both higher in the summer of 2021, we are in more collective danger now that the vaccines are losing strength and we have almost no NPIs. This happened concurrently with the CDC changing the maps of how to assess risk, leaving people looking at green maps (with data that would have made them red a year ago) and perceiving that we are at much less risk while we are at more.

From the May 19, 2024 article:

Donald Trump’s long-fraught relationship with the Covid vaccine is again becoming a political liability for the former president as he tries to stop his voters from potentially defecting to independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Trump is threatening to “not give one penny” to schools or colleges that mandate the Covid-19 vaccine. He is accusing Kennedy of being a “fake” anti-vaxxer. And he is rarely mentioning what he once touted as “one of the greatest miracles” of his presidency — his program to speed development of the vaccine.

...

“Trump’s statements are clearly deliberate and politically calculated to negate the threat that [Kennedy] has become to him,” Republican strategist and former Trump administration appointee Matthew Bartlett said. “Otherwise, he would be demanding a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed and taking credit for ending the pandemic.”

(originally from here: https://twitter.com/adamtotscomix/status/1279329941147004930 )

2023 / 39

Aperçu of the Week:

"I would like to ask you what language the Palestinians speak? Was there a Palestinian coin at some point in history? Is there a Palestinian history or a Palestinian culture? There isn't. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people."

(Bezalel Joel Smotrich, Finance Minister of Israel and Chairman of the right-wing "Religious Zionism" party)

Bad News of the Week:

Serbia and Kosovo. Sadly, proof that the tensions that led to the Yugoslav Wars in the Balkans from 1991 to 2001 are far from over. The conflict over Kosovo is centuries old. The area has special significance for Serbia because it is home to numerous medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries. Serbian nationalists also see a symbol of their independence in a battle against Ottoman Turks in 1389 in Kosovo. However, the majority - then and now - are ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo. They are mostly Muslims. They regard the area as their country and accuse the Serbs of having oppressed them for decades. Formerly granted special rights have been revoked, for example. In February 2008, Kosovo declared itself independent, and since then the region has been up in the air, with NATO stationing KFOR protection troops there.

Now the situation is escalating again. Already last April, there were clashes when Serbs boycotted local elections in the region. In the process, 30 NATO peacekeepers and more than 50 Serb protesters were injured. The fuse has been smoldering ever since. Last weekend, a conflict broke out between armed Serbs and Kosovar police, ending in deaths. Allegedly, however, this was not an official Serbian military unit, but the private militia of a Serbian businessman. What nobody believes.

Now for days Serbia has been pulling together an unprecedented amount of infantry, tanks and artillery - at 48 points directly on the border. Of course Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, speaking to the Financial Times, denied that his country was planning military action. But John Kirby, the usually well-informed spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, confirmed it. "We are seeing a large Serbian military presence along the border with Kosovo," he said. This includes "an unprecedented deployment of Serbian artillery, tanks, and mechanized infantry units."

It is with some trepidation that I currently pay attention when a "news alert" goes ping. For once again, a cold war may become a hot one. In the middle of Europe. Because of the imperialistic claim to power of one nation against another. Geostrategy and testosterone. Frustrating.

Good News of the Week:

"Judge's ruling on Trump financial empire poses existential threat." was a headline on CNN last Wednesday. Donald Trump and his Trump organization had committed "financial fraud for years." Is that a surprise? No. At least not to Europeans. Who never understood that a windbag like Donald Jessica Trump could get away with such obvious lies for so long in a state of law. And then also leads the forecasts for the upcoming US presidential elections. Excuse me?

Finally, on Friday, Trumpist Scott Hall pleaded guilty to multiple counts of attempted election fraud in the Georgia trial. Trump is among the other 18 co-accused. I can't believe anyone could be so naive as to believe a bail bondsman would have completely independently committed the exact acts that were in Trump's playbook - "I want you to find the votes!"

The GOP seems to be unable to break with the 45th president in U.S. history. Various potential opponents, but especially the powerful super PACs in the background, are increasingly disillusioned that the candidacy is unlikely to be taken away from him. His approval ratings seem rock solid. But slowly I'm getting the sense (or the hope) - from across the ocean - that the legal manifestation of his constant misbehavior is having an effect on the American (voting) people. I've lost track of how many cases Trump is currently charged with in which court anyway. And it's all there: Fraud, Porn Star, bribery, Rudy Giuliani, rape, defamation, fixer, tax evasion - you name it. Seriously, a guy like that couldn't even get himself nominated for the Recording Secretary of a flower growers club anywhere in the world. And yet could become president for the second time in the Land of unlimited opportunities? The supposedly most powerful man in the world?

I fundamentally believe in the good in people. But there are exceptions. Trump is one of them. When I think about which personality would put the greater good above personal ego, I certainly can't think of him. So when there are again and again brave prosecutors and special investigators who stand up to Mar-A-Lago, the Proud Boys and Matt Gaetz, I pay them my respect. And in the end this guy is simply unelectable. Now all we need is for enough hockey moms in the suburbs and used car salesmen in the rust belt to realize that. He's not one of you. He's not anti-establishment. He's a notorious egomaniac. He doesn't have your best interests at heart. But only his own.

Personal happy moment of the week:

Hello again! The coronavirus is back: as soon as it gets cooler, the variant BA.2.86, called "Pirola", starts to spread. With new symptoms, an extensive resistance to the previous vaccines and practically without monitoring - because a test regime or even a data collection does not take place (anymore). The shock was correspondingly great when a colleague first called in sick at the beginning of the week and then submitted the information "COVID infection". I am one of the three colleagues who had the most intensive contact with him in the preceding days. Immediately, a colleague got rapid tests, all of which were negative. A follow-up test two days later also confirms that I got away with it once again. Lucky me.

I couldn't care less...

...about the political future of Rishi Sunak. The British prime minister, in office for less than a year, looks pale and erratic. There is no sign of leadership or vision. There are plenty of headwinds at the current Tory party conference: the Conservatives are 20% behind the Social Democrats in polls. The economy is not recovering, there is no normalization after the Brexit chaos. The migration issue is inflated and not solved. Climate targets are being softened, climate measures put on hold. Rail infrastructure measures are being cut, mobility with automobiles is being supported. His party's populism is becoming more and more right-wing, and increasing radicalism is dividing the country. Soon, Labour may adopt the old Brexiteer slogan "taking back control."

As I write this...

...I am glad that a deal was brokered between the Writers' Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Lasting 148 days, the strike was one of the longest in the history of writers for television and cinema in the USA. So my much liked late night show hosts will soon be able to entertain me with their monologues again.

Post Scriptum

For 40 years there should have been a worldwide holiday on September 26. Because the Russian Stanislav Petrov prevented the third world war in 1983. The computer in a Soviet control center reported an American nuclear attack. However, the responsible officer Petrov believed in a false alarm (in the end, a spy satellite was irritated by reflections of the sun), refused to trigger the nuclear counterattack and thus saved mankind.

Just so nobody can say this is out of context, here's a vid of the entire interview.

The Obama administration successfully contained the Ebola outbreak in the United States. The death toll for Ebola in the US was under a dozen. So before leaving office, the Obama National Security Council created a 69-page handbook on how to deal with a pandemic. Trump and his flunkies ignored it with disastrous results.

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

The US death toll from COVID-19 is in seven digits. Other industrialized countries with advanced technological infrastructure such as Canada, Taiwan, Germany, and New Zealand had lower fatality rates per capita.

Trump largely ignored the virus until well into March when it had a chance to spread across the US.

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life The president was aware of the danger from the coronavirus – but a lack of leadership has created an emergency of epic proportions

The Trump administration, at best, was in denial; at worst, it sabotaged the pandemic response.

Trump White House made 'deliberate efforts' to undermine Covid response, report says

Trump zombies who claim the economy was marvelous under Trump conveniently forget about everything that happened after February of 2020. Trump's early bungling of the pandemic plunged the economy into recession. The COVID supply chain problems and the economic stimulus required to prevent a depression led to the spurt in inflation which is finally receding.

People who are nostalgic about taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, drinking bleach, and sticking UV lights up their butts must be excited about the opportunity to vote for Trump again.

Three years after receiving a $700 million pandemic-era lifeline from the federal government, the struggling freight trucking company Yellow is filing for bankruptcy.

After monthslong negotiations between Yellow’s management and the Teamsters union broke down, the company shut its operations late last month, and said on Sunday that it was seeking bankruptcy protection so it could wind down its business in an “orderly” way.

“It is with profound disappointment that Yellow announces that it is closing after nearly 100 years in business,” the company’s chief executive, Darren Hawkins, said in a statement. Yellow filed a so-called Chapter 11 petition in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

The downfall of the 99-year-old company will lead to the loss of about 30,000 jobs and could have ripple effects across the nation’s supply chains. It also underscores the risks associated with government bailouts that are awarded during moments of economic panic.

Yellow, which formerly went by the name YRC Worldwide, received the $700 million loan during the summer of 2020 as the pandemic was paralyzing the U.S. economy. The loan was awarded as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic-relief legislation that Congress passed that year, and Yellow received it on the grounds that its business was critical to national security because it shipped supplies to military bases. Government watchdogs have scrutinized the loan because of the company’s financial turmoil and close ties to the Trump administration, which awarded the loan.

Since then, Yellow changed its name and embarked on a restructuring plan to help revive its flagging business by consolidating its regional networks of trucking services under one brand. As of the end of March, Yellow’s outstanding debt was $1.5 billion, including about $730 million that it owed to the federal government. Yellow has paid approximately $66 million in interest on the loan, but it has repaid just $230 of the principal owed on the loan, which comes due next year.

The fate of the loan is not yet clear. The federal government assumed a 30% equity stake in Yellow in exchange for the loan. It could end up assuming or trying to sell off much of the company’s fleet of trucks and terminals. Yellow aims to sell “all or substantially all” of its assets, according to court documents. Mr. Hawkins said the company intended to pay back the government loan “in full.”

The White House declined to comment.

Yellow estimated that it has more than 100,000 creditors and more than $1 billion in liabilities, per court documents. Some of its largest unsecured creditors include Amazon, with a claim of more than $2 million, and Home Depot, which is owed nearly $1.7 million.

Yellow is the third-largest small-freight trucking company in a part of the industry known as “less than truckload” shipping. The industry has been under pressure over the last year from rising interest rates and higher fuel costs, while customers have been reluctant to accept higher prices.

Those forces collided with an ugly labor fight this year between Yellow and the Teamsters union over wages and other benefits. Those talks collapsed last month and union officials soon after warned workers that the company was shutting down.

After its bankruptcy filing, company officials placed much of the blame on the union, saying its members caused “irreparable harm” by halting its restructuring plan. Yellow employed about 23,000 union employees.

“We faced nine months of union intransigence, bullying and deliberately destructive tactics,” Mr. Hawkins said. The Teamsters union “was able to halt our business plan, literally driving our company out of business, despite every effort to work with them,” he added.

In late June, the company filed a lawsuit against the union, asserting it had caused more than $137 million in damages by blocking the restructuring plan.

The Teamsters union said that Yellow’s executives unjustly blamed the union for the demise of the company, which had been “plagued with financial trouble for nearly two decades,” officials said in a statement.

“Teamster families sacrificed billions of dollars in wages, benefits and retirement security to rescue Yellow,” said Sean O’Brien, the union’s general president. “The company blew through a $700 million government bailout.” Calling Yellow’s top executives “dysfunctional” and “greedy,” he blamed them for failing to “take responsibility for squandering all that cash.”

The bankruptcy could create temporary disruptions for companies that relied on Yellow and might prompt more consolidation in the industry. It could also lead to temporarily higher prices as businesses find new carriers for their freight.

“Those inflationary prices will certainly hurt the shippers and hurt the consumer to a certain extent,” said Tom Nightingale, chief executive of AFS Logistics, who suggested that prices would probably normalize within a few months.

In late July, Yellow began permanently laying off workers and ceased most of its operations in the United States and Canada, according to court documents. Yellow has retained a “core group” of about 1,650 employees to maintain limited operations and provide administrative work as it winds down. Yellow said it expected to pay about $3.4 million per week in employee wages to operate during bankruptcy, which “may decrease over time.” None of the remaining employees are union members, the company said.

The company also sought the authority to pay an estimated $22 million in compensation and benefit costs for current and former employees, including roughly $8.7 million in unpaid wages as of the date of filing.

Yellow had readily accessible funds of about $39 million when it filed for bankruptcy, which it said would be insufficient to cover its wind-down efforts, and it expected to receive special financing to help support the sale process and payment of wages.

Jack Atkins, a transportation analyst at the financial services firm Stephens, said that Yellow’s troubles had been mounting for years. In the wake of the financial crisis, Yellow engaged in a spree of acquisitions that it failed to successfully integrate, Mr. Atkins said. The demands of repaying that debt made it difficult for Yellow to reinvest in the company, allowing rivals to become more profitable.

“Yellow was struggling to keep its head above water and survive,” Mr. Atkins said. “It was harder and harder to be profitable enough to support the wage increases they needed.”

David P. Leibowitz, a Chicago bankruptcy lawyer who represents several trucking companies, said Yellow had found itself in a “perfect storm, and they have not managed that perfect storm very well.”

The company’s financial problems fueled concerns. It lost more than $100 million in 2019 and was being sued by the Justice Department over claims that it defrauded the federal government during a seven-year period. Last year it agreed to pay $6.85 million to settle the lawsuit.

Congressional oversight committees have scrutinized the company’s relationships with the Trump administration. President Donald J. Trump tapped Mr. Hawkins to serve on a coronavirus economic task force, and Yellow had financial backing from Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with close ties to Trump administration officials.

Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis wrote in a report last year that top Trump administration officials had awarded Yellow the money over the objections of career officials at the Defense Department. The report noted that Yellow had been in close touch with Trump administration officials throughout the loan process and had discussed how the company employed Teamsters as its drivers.

In December 2020, Steven T. Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, defended the loan, arguing that had the company been shuttered, thousands of jobs would have been at risk and the military’s supply chain could have been disrupted. He predicted that the federal government would eventually turn a profit from the deal.

“Yellow had longstanding financial problems before the pandemic, was not essential to national security and thus should never have received a $700 million taxpayer bailout from the Treasury Department,” Representative French Hill, Republican of Arkansas and a member of the Congressional Oversight Commission, said in a statement. “Years of poor financial management at Yellow has resulted in hard-working people losing their jobs.”

so i didn't know i had tumblr savior installed until i finally looked up a fix for why tumblr on browser would never show usernames on posts and it turns out tumblr savior was causing it but this is how i also discovered why every now and then i'd see a "this post has been hidden because mention of: TRUMP" post. like i guess i just thought tumblr was automatically hiding any posts that mentioned trump like that was just a quirky new feature implemented in the time since i'd last used the site.

Tomi Lahren und ihre Gedankenwelt

Tomi Lahren arbeit für Fox-News und ist so ziemlich an der rechten Wand. Also, viel weiter nach rechts geht es bei ihr und für sie gar nicht mehr und, sie gehört zu den Menschen, die es sich gerne im Hintern von Donald Trump bequem machen würde. Es wundert also auf keinen Fall, dass sie immer mal wieder gegen Impfungen, Covid-19, Geimpfte und so weiter schiesst. Gleichzeitig stellt man dann aber fest: sie ist gar nicht so eine helle Leuchte. Selbst in einem abgedunkelten Raum schafft sie es nicht, so hell wie sie ist, ein ganz klein wenig Licht in den Raum zu bringen.

Trump failed during the pandemic, but he always acted as if he was a strong leader getting the job done. Polls consistently say that voters think he's a stronger leader than Biden -- mostly, I think, because he postures like one. So I'm not surprised that he's getting away with godawful crisis management. Republicans often do.

No More Mister Nice Blog: REPUBLICANS GET A LOT OF MULLIGANS

Amorc dove 🕊 pronoas ny ny 10010 23 Lexington avenue 1401 = chelsea manhattan princess with 9 wild christmas = essential worker = christophermastronardi-blog.tumblr.com