monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Sanders knew that he didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting anywhere on an independent ticket, because Americans are convinced that it's a wasted vote. He threw his hat in the ring as a democrat.

It's there he remains, though you've gotta wonder about the psyche of anyone who wants to continue into their twilight years.

Maybe the bribes are just too tempting.

You repeatedly make this claim. Would you explain how Clinton did this? What "good people" were driven away? Where did they go?

They had twenty-four candidates in the race, and Biden wasn't the "best" they could come up with. Many of the better candidates split votes between themselves while the Sanders people, who already had money and a nationwide organization, gave their candidate a solid lead. Most Democrats thought he was unlikely to win in the general election and settled on Biden when it was obvious that none of the other remaining candidates could put together a coalition that could beat him.

Donna Brazile is the former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee. Excerpted from the book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House to be published on November 7, 2017 by Hachette Books, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright 2017 Donna Brazile.

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party—she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was. How much control Brooklyn had and for how long was still something I had been trying to uncover for the last few weeks.

By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart.

***

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.

“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.”

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.

“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”

The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.

I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.

More at the source

But that's old news. After 2016 the DNC reorganized itself to prepare for 2020. Who left — which "good people" — and where did they go was the question I asked. And I want to know why you phrase it as if the DNC "came up with" candidates for 2020. That's not how it works — if it had worked that way there wouldn't have been twenty-four candidates at one time.

Off the cuff, care to name five of them??

We never heard about a single one of them, and none were discussed on this particular forum.

I understand that you don't follow US-politics closely, but are some threads blocked for you?

Not to my knowledge, Walter.

Who were the two candidates just chipped by creepy Joe Biden?

Without any research I can come up with Sanders, Biden, Buttegieg, Klobuchar, Warren, Harris, Gabbard, Inslee, Bullock, Bennet, Yang, Gillebrand, Bloomberg, Booker, and Castro.

You can find the rest HERE.


That's not my fault. Some of them were discussed on other threads.

You haven't shown that the DNC "came up with" these candidates.

You haven't said who the "good people" who left the DNC are.

You haven't told us where they went.

Warren and Bloom berger maybe, but the rest?? No wonder they got nowhere.

Now tell us how creepy Joe could possibly be the key candidate.

Try to be gentle with Builder, as a flat earthier and an Australian he’s having to reconcile himself to the fact that he doesn’t exist.

That’s probably why he can only talk ****.

LOL

What gets me about these conspiracy nuts is they talk Total bollocks then call everyone else stupid for not believing obvious bullshit.

nyt
Yikes

Old fashioned, quality investigative journalism. Where might one find that rare creature?
WP

Go ahead and read the whole piece for a study in how Ingraham represents this long-dead journalistic tradition.

I hope some reporter asks Donnie Two Scoops about this:

If he feels that the 12,000 deaths under the previous administration was a total disaster and that was over a period of 18 months, what does he have to say about his administrations death toll of 60+ thousand in less than 3 months.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-h1n1-swine-flu-pandemic-spin/

In a March 4 telephone interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, for example, Trump falsely claimed that the Obama administration “didn’t do anything” about the 2009 pandemic.

Trump, March 42020: Well, I just say that it’s, you know, a very, very small number in this country. And we’re going to try and keep it that way as much as possible. I will say, though, the H1N1, that was swine flu, commonly referred to as swine flu. And that went from around April of ’09 to April of ’10, where there were 60 million cases of swine flu. And over — actually, it’s over 13,000. I think you might have said 17. I had heard it was 13, but a lot of — a lot of deaths. And they didn’t do anything about it. Interestingly, with the swine flu, children were — in particular, they were vulnerable, sort of the opposite in that respect. But children were very vulnerable to the swine flu. But they never did close the borders. I don’t think they ever did have the travel ban. And we did. And, again, they lost at least 13,000.


In a March 12 meeting with the prime minister of Ireland, Trump repeated the sentiment.

“If you go back and look at the swine flu, and what happened with the swine flu, you’ll see how many people died, and how actually nothing was done for such a long period of time, as people were dying all over the place,” he said. “We’re doing it the opposite. We’re very much ahead of everything.”

Trump is correct on the number of H1N1 cases and deaths, but it’s misleading to compare those figures to the current outbreak of COVID-19, which has just begun. It’s also not true that the Obama administration did nothing or waited a long time to act on the H1N1 influenza pandemic.

In 2009, a new H1N1 influenza virus cropped up out of season, in late spring. Because of genetic similarities to influenza viruses in pigs, it became known as a “swine flu,” even though there is no evidence the virus spread between pigs or pigs to humans.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were about 60.8 million cases of infection with the novel type of influenza virus in the U.S. between April 2009 and April 2010, with a total of approximately 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths.

While that death toll may sound high, it’s over an entire year and, in fact, ended up being far lower than was initially expected. The strain of influenza also turned out to have a case fatality rate of just 0.02% — well below even many typical seasonal influenzas.

Everything that’s known about the new coronavirus so far suggests that it’s an entirely different beast than its most recent pandemic predecessor. Peter Jay Hotez, a professor and dean of the tropical medicine school at Baylor College of Medicine, told us that the new virus, which is known as SARS-CoV-2, is considerably more transmissible and more lethal than H1N1.

For those reasons, he said, “the urgency to contain this coronavirus is so much greater than the H1N1 2009 one was.”

In the Hannity interview, Trump touted his travel restrictions and noted that Obama “never did close the borders.” Paul A. Offit, chair of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed that Trump’s travel restrictions bought the U.S. time to react, but he said it didn’t make any sense to impose travel restrictions in 2009 since the H1N1 was first reported in North America and the flu is “hard to stop.”

“I don’t think it is a fair comparison,” Offit said. “The flu is constantly mutating – it usually happens in pig and humans in southeast Asia – it is really hard to stop that. Unless you ban all travel anywhere in the world to the United States you would have had trouble. That is true with all flu pandemics. I don’t think a travel ban would have ever made a difference.”

Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that the Obama administration did “nothing,” officials declared a public health emergency early in the H1N1 outbreak, secured funding from Congress and ultimately declared a national emergency, as we’ll explain below.

On top of that, the CDC sequenced the new virus, created testing kits, and the Food and Drug Administration approved multiple vaccines, among other actions.

Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, praised the CDC at a House hearing in 2016 for quickly developing a vaccine for the swine flu in about six months — in time for the start of the school year in September 2009. “So that’s a 6-month time frame if I’m doing my math correctly that you were able to identify the genetic sequence of the virus, reverse engineer a vaccine, test it, assure its safety and efficacy, and get it to school teachers on the second week of school. That’s pretty impressive,” he said.

Trump said in a tweet that the Obama administration’s response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic “was a full scale disaster.” While he can have that opinion, there is little to support such a negative view.

A New York Times article from January 2010 said that while some mistakes were made, a variety of experts thought the administration had generally handled things well.

William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine told the Times that officials deserved “at least a B-plus,” while Mount Sinai virologist Peter Palese called the overall response “excellent.”
Obama’s Emergency Declarations

In one tweet, Trump quoted Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs as misleadingly claiming that it “took 6 months for President Obama to declare a National Emergency” for the H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak that “killed 12,000 Americans.” It’s true that Obama didn’t declare a national emergency for six months, but that ignores several other steps the administration took, including declaring a public health emergency the same month that the novel H1N1 infections were first reported.

At the time of the tweet, Trump had not yet declared a national emergency for COVID-19.

(Dobbs’ actual quote was slightly different. He said on his March 12 show that it “took six months for President Obama to then declare a national emergency, one that ultimately killed more than 12,000 Americans and infected 60 million more.”)

On April 15, 2009, the first infection was identified in California, according to the CDC, and less than two weeks later, on April 26, 2009, the Obama administration declared a public health emergency. The day before, on April 25, the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency.

Dr. Richard Besser, then-acting director of the CDC, confirmed to the press on the day of the U.S. declaration that there were 20 cases of H1N1 in the U.S., and that “all of the individuals in this country who have been identified as cases have recovered.”

The same day — April 26 — the CDC began releasing antiviral drugs to treat the H1N1 flu, and two days later, the FDA approved a new CDC test for the disease, according to a CDC timeline on the pandemic.

On April 30, 2009, two days after the public health emergency declaration, Obama formally asked Congress for $1.5 billion to fight the outbreak, and later asked for nearly $9 billion, according a September 2009 Congressional Research Service report. On June 26, 2009, Obama signed Congress’ supplemental appropriation bill that included $7.7 billion for the outbreak.

The U.S. public health emergency was renewed twice — on July 24, 2009, and Oct. 1, 2009.

The WHO declared H1N1 a pandemic on June 11, 2009. Obama declared a national emergency related to the pandemic on Oct. 24, 2009. At the time, the CDC director, Dr. Thomas Frieden, had said millions of people had been infected in the U.S. and more than 1,000 had died. Also about 11.3 million doses of H1N1 vaccine had been distributed, he said.

A month later, on Nov. 12, 2009, the CDC published a report that estimated there had been between 14 million and 34 million H1N1 cases between April 17 and Oct. 17, 2009, and 2,500 to 6,000 H1N1-related deaths.

The H1N1 2009 flu pandemic ultimately did kill 12,000 Americans — the figure Dobbs used — according to the midrange estimate from CDC for April 12, 2009, to April 10, 2010. The number of cases totaled an estimated 60.8 million people. To be clear, that strain of the flu continues to cause infections and deaths, at least 75,000 deaths from 2009 to 2018, the CDC says.

In the case of that pandemic, the outbreak began in Mexico and spread quickly to the United States. The first cases in Mexico were identified in March and early April 2009, with the Mexican government reporting an outbreak to the Pan American Health Organization on April 12, 2009, according to a CDC report.

In the case of COVID-19, the earliest known instances of the disease occurred in early December in Wuhan, China, and officials reported an outbreak to the WHO on Dec. 31. The CDC announced the first American case on Jan. 21. The Trump administration declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31, one day after the WHO did so, and announced a national emergency on March 13. Two days before, the WHO had declared the global outbreak a pandemic.

Has to be a mistake. Donnie Two Scoops said it wouldn't go over 60,000.

People won't die for the economy but will just to make a liar out of the Orange Shitgibbon.

I'm hoping the curve was flattened enough to dampen a probable second wave. Traffic here in the middle of Texas is about normal. Not a good sign.

Every time someone tries to use COVID19 as a reason to change regimes, it just makes it seem like COVID19 is a political tool to install a Democrat/socialist regime.

People are terrified of socialism because of Hitler and Stalin. They are terrified of having a pandemic stimulate a regime change and global terrorism becoming emboldened to use biological attacks to achieve future political goals as well.

You can go on and on about how conspiracy theories are insane, but people understand that even if COVID19 is in no way a biological political weapon, our response to it sets a precedent for how biological weapons can be used politically in the future, and no one wants that.

If you really want to get Biden or some other candidate elected, you should focus on promoting their politics and not on blaming the current Trump regime for COVID19 because when you do that it just sounds like terrorism-talk, and people don't want to submit to terroristic-authoritarianism.

There you go making sense again. Information about what actually happened will only confuse him.

30 million Americans have now applied for unemployment insurance. For perspective, that is approximately equal to the total population of Canada.

Too bad it's clearly impossible for our virus-addled ruler to do anything remotely like this in the USA:

Pakistan's virus-idled workers hired to plant trees

Officials say move will create more than 60,000 jobs as gov't aims to help those who lost jobs due to COVID-19 lockdown.