monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Trump is in the position to know these things, and like it or not Americans trust him more than the MSM.

He's a winner . . .

an inspector general leads an organisation charged with examining the actions of a government agency.

Dan Gardner
@dgardner
58m
If the upward trend in stocks has you thinking the worst must be over, remember in 1930 a rally pushed the Dow up 48%, there were three big rallies in 1931, and a whopping 93% rally in 1932. The Great Depression hit bottom in 1933. It took 7 years and a world war to climb out.

Some Swedish Hospitals Have Stopped Using Chloroquine to Treat COVID-19 After Reports of Severe Side Effects

According to the national paper Expressen, hospitals in the Västra Götaland region are no longer offering the antimalarial medication, with side effects reported to include cramps and the loss of peripheral vision.

In addition, we have no strong evidence that chloroquine has an effect on COVID-19."

Quote:

Some Swedish Hospitals Have Stopped Using Chloroquine to Treat COVID-19 After Reports of Severe Side Effects

I hope you're not implying that Trump might endanger citizens health and lives through pushing a "treatment" that, if it magically worked on covid, would make him appear a hero and win him another election (not to mention make him some money through investments he has in the production source).

Wisconsin’s election nightmare is a preview of what could happen in November

To call what’s happening in Wisconsin right now a “stolen election” is perhaps too mild a description. Because of the state’s Republicans and the intercession of the Supreme Court, not only are thousands of Americans being disenfranchised, thousands more are risking their health and perhaps their very lives to go to polls in an election that should never have taken place.

This is a very ominous sign for what will happen in November. There will be battles across the country over how the upcoming election will be conducted — whether it will be fair, whether everyone will have access to the ballot and whether we’ll be able to trust the result.

And the Supreme Court will be there to put a thumb on the scales for the Republican Party.

As we’ve seen, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers attempted to postpone the state’s primary scheduled for Tuesday, issuing a last-minute executive order after failing to get the Republican-controlled state legislature to agree to a delay. Because the state had been deluged with absentee ballot requests — causing some voters not to get their ballots in time — a federal judge had ordered the state to accept ballots postmarked for an additional six days. Republicans sued to get that ruling overturned and to force the election to go on as scheduled.

Why were they so eager to have the election in the middle of this pandemic? The key race was for a seat on the state supreme court, which will help them solidify their conservative majority, which is in turn vital to maintaining the system of minority rule in Wisconsin. That includes the extraordinary partisan gerrymander of state legislative districts engineered by Republicans, a gerrymander so brutally effective that in the 2018 state assembly elections, Democrats won 53 percent of the votes but Republicans won 63 of the 99 seats.

Republicans know their voters are more likely to have already voted absentee or live in less-populated areas where they can vote safely at a less-crowded polling place. Democrats, on the other hand, are being forced to literally risk their lives to vote. In Milwaukee, a city of 600,000 people, the number of polling places was reduced from 180 to five.

Late Monday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Evers didn’t have the authority to postpone the election, so it had to go forward.

On top of that, in a 5-4 decision along party lines, the U.S. Supreme Court then overruled the federal judge’s previous decision, thereby requiring that only ballots postmarked by Tuesday could be counted.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, “The Court’s order requires absentee voters to postmark their ballots by election day, April 7 — i.e., tomorrow — even if they did not receive their ballots by that date,” she wrote. “That is a novel requirement.”

She added that the majority’s insistence that the pandemic does not create a fundamentally different situation than ordinary elections “boggles the mind.”

So the Republicans will succeed in rigging the Tuesday election in Wisconsin; they’re no doubt giving each other high-fives as they see the long lines in Milwaukee. But what does this portend for November?

“This entire mess in Wisconsin is a cautionary tale," Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, told me. “It’s a real warning of what could happen in many places across the country if we don’t put in place new systems to run the election in the face of the pandemic.”

The problem is that Republicans from President Trump on down are now openly acknowledging that making voting too easy — for instance, by mailing every registered voter an absentee ballot so they don’t have to gather at the polls — would mean too many people voting, which would be bad for the GOP. So they’ll do what it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Which leads me to my own nightmare scenario, in which there are 50 lawsuits in 50 states over whatever accommodations are made to an election during a pandemic. In Republican-run states, Democrats will sue to force the state to change rules to make voting safe and fair, and in Democratic-run states, Republicans will sue to stop Democrats from doing the same thing.

We just learned that a month and a half before President Trump truly acknowledged the gravity of the coronavirus outbreak, his top trade adviser warned that 500,000 Americans could die of it.

Axios first reported on the Jan. 29 memo from Peter Navarro, in which Navarro said the virus could claim more than a half million lives because it was much more serious than the seasonal flu.

Navarro would later follow that up with a Feb. 23 memo that offered an even more dire prediction. “There is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls,” Navarro said.

Despite these warnings, it wouldn’t be until mid-March that President Trump would truly acknowledge the gravity of the situation. He would repeatedly say the situation was “under control,” downplay the threat, and compare it to the flu, despite Navarro and others rejecting that comparison.

But it’s merely the latest example of a warning that apparently wasn’t heeded in the early days of the outbreak. Trump would impose certain travel restrictions on flights from China, but would otherwise resist truly warning the country and taking further steps.

Below is a timeline of all the warning signs

Dec. 31: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention learn of a cluster of cases in China.

Jan. 1: The CDC begins developing reports for the Department of Health and Human Services about the situation.

Jan. 3: A Chinese official officially informs CDC Director Robert Redfield of the outbreak of a respiratory illness in the city of Wuhan. Redfield later relays the information to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, and Azar informs the White House National Security Council.

Early January: Intelligence officials begin offering ominous, classified warnings about the virus to Trump in the President’s Daily Brief. The warnings will persist into February.

Jan. 8: The CDC issues its first public warning about the outbreak in China, saying it is monitoring the situation, and people should take precautions when traveling to Wuhan.

Mid-January: Assistant HHS Secretary for Preparedness and Response Robert Kadlec instructs subordinates to make contingency plans for using the Defense Production Act, which allows the federal government to compel the production of certain materials in a crisis.

Jan. 17: The CDC begins monitoring major airports for passengers arriving from China.

Jan. 18: Azar, who had been trying to speak to Trump about the virus, is finally able to speak with him. Before Azar can begin talking about the virus, though, Trump interjects to ask him about a federal crackdown on vaping.

Jan. 21: The first confirmed coronavirus case arrives in the United States, in Seattle.

Jan. 22: Trump makes his first comments about the coronavirus, saying he is not concerned about a pandemic. “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. … It’s going to be just fine.”

Jan. 23: Chinese officials take the drastic step of shutting down Wuhan.

Jan. 27: Concerned White House aides meet with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to get senior officials to pay more attention to the issue. Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argues it could cost Trump his reelection and says the virus is likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.

Jan. 29: A Navarro memo warns of 500,000 or more American deaths and says it is “unlikely the introduction of the coronavirus into the U.S. population in significant numbers will mimic a ‘seasonal flu’ event with relatively low contagion and mortality rates.”

Jan. 30: China expands the lockdown beyond just Wuhan to the entire province of Hubei, as the World Health Organization declares a global health emergency.

Jan. 30: Trump says of the threat: “ … We think it’s going to have a very good ending for it. So that I can assure you.”

Jan. 31: Trump announces travel restrictions from China after three major airlines announced they had halted flights.

Early February: Other White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, join Grogan in calling for a more forceful response. Pottinger pushes for expanding the travel ban to countries such as Italy and earns the support of Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. but the plan is resisted by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who cited economic concerns.

Feb. 5: Trump’s impeachment trial ends with his acquittal by the Senate.

Feb. 10: Trump says, “I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine.”

Feb. 19: Trump says, “I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.”

Feb. 23: Another Navarro memo warns of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”

Feb. 23: Italy begins to see evidence of a major outbreak in the Lombardy region.

Feb. 24: As Iran becomes a hot spot, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns of a possible pandemic. “There is a lot of speculation about whether this increase means that this epidemic has now become a pandemic,” he says.

Feb. 24: Trump says, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

Feb. 26: Trump says, “When you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

Feb. 27: Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who had received briefings on the threat, tells a private luncheon that the coronavirus is “much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history” and is “is probably more akin to the 1918 [influenza] pandemic,” in which 50 million or more people died worldwide.

Feb. 28: Trump says, “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Feb. 29: The United States records its first coronavirus death and announces new travel restrictions for Iran, Italy and South Korea.

March 3: The CDC lifts restrictions on coronavirus testing.

March 10: Trump says, “Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 11: The White House suspends travel from most European countries, as the WHO declares a global pandemic.

March 11: Trump says, “I think we’re going to get through it very well.”

March 13: Trump declares a national emergency.

March 16: Trump for the first time publicly reflects on the gravity of he situation. Asked about his repeated comments saying the situation was “under control,” he says, “If you’re talking about the virus, no, that’s not under control for any place in the world. … I was talking about what we’re doing is under control, but I’m not talking about the virus.”

David Atkins
@DavidOAtkins
2h
Imagine the gun-toting riots that would ensue if you slashed all the polling places where old white people live and opened up polling places on every block where POC and students live.

attempts to malign blatham for the same things

This Is Trump’s Fault
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.

"I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up...

obviously haven't heard a word trump has said in four years.