Stephan: We are literally watching our country come apart. Today, not for the first time, but establishing it as a trend, I heard the president and other Republicans start to layout two arguments. First, we live with 33,000 gun deaths a year and have for decades, but we haven't changed the 2nd Amendment. Second, Americans are soldiers in what amounts to a war. There will be casualties. There will be deaths, as there are in any war. Do you think of your granny, living in a nursing home, as a soldier who must be prepared to give up their life in the service of the economy? Probably not. But that is the way Trump looks at her.
All of this is being done to improve Trump's re-election chances, and smokescreen the reality which is: We are living through a disaster being created mostly not by Covid-19 but by the incompetence, willful ignorance, and greed of Trump and those around him. 3,000 deads a day. Suck it up, be a patriot they are telling the Trumpers.
I even saw a report that in the Trumper quarter many consider the wearing of masks "unmanly." That was the secret signal, the dog whistle, Trump sent by going to a mask factory not wearing a mask. Nor did anyone around him.
As Covid-19 moves into rural America, the gross inadequacy of the illness profit system in those unprofitable low population areas is going to become very obvious. I say again: We have 4.25% of the world's population but 32% of world's coronavirus cases. And that's just the ones we know about. Why isn't everyone talking about this? Trump, McConnell, all the Republicans are trying an Orwellian gaslight of the whole pandemic. You can watch it happen. The question is going to be will people believe it?
Also, as a result of what the Trump administration has done the geopolitics of the world has also experienced a transformational crisis. For your lifetime and mine, America was the geopolitical leader. Even in the Cold War everyone really understood that the world leader was the United States. That is no longer true. In three years, Trump has so severely damaged the way America is perceived that it may not be possible to fully repair it. Trump's withdrawal from the WHO is just the latest example of these self-inflicted wounds.
A broad coalition of US health systems has mobilized to ramp up coronavirus testing in a national effort on a scale not seen since the second world war. But declarations of false victory by the Trump administration and a vacuum of federal leadership have undermined the endeavor, leading experts to warn that reopening the US could result in a disaster.
Interviews with agents on the frontlines of the coronavirus battle – lab directors, chemists, manufacturers, epidemiologists, academics and technologists – reveal as diverse an application of the legendary American ingenuity as the century has seen.
Test kit manufacturers are running production lines around the clock to triple their output, and triple it again. A private healthcare institute in California has constructed a mega-lab to process thousands of tests daily and deliver the results by text message. In smaller labs across the country, microbiologists improvise each day to fill unpredictable supply chain gaps that might leave them without swabs one day, and without crucial chemicals the next.
Medicare For All would eliminate all of these problems. I wonder when we will wake up and admit it?
Rev. Dean
on Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 11:40 am
The damned Republican Representative for our district as virus cases keep going up and up all over our state. He is another Trumper idiot, who does not care about killing off his own family and many others, too. We will try to get rid of him when voting time comes, and we will not listen to his “opening up” ideas.
Medicare For All would eliminate all of these problems. I wonder when we will wake up and admit it?
The damned Republican Representative for our district as virus cases keep going up and up all over our state. He is another Trumper idiot, who does not care about killing off his own family and many others, too. We will try to get rid of him when voting time comes, and we will not listen to his “opening up” ideas.