Author: BigGuy

Americans are just days away from going over the economic cliff, and the president and Senate Republicans are attempting to sabotage any coronavirus relief package. Let’s start with the most indefensible position first. The number of deaths from the novel coronavirus surpassed 140,000 in the U.S. on Sunday morning according to Johns Hopkins data. The U.S. confirmed on Saturday more than 71,500 new cases in 24 hours — the second highest number to the record 75,600-plus set last Thursday. And yet, the Trump Death Cult is pushing to block new money for testing, tracing and CDC in upcoming coronavirus relief bill: The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday. The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said. The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux. [T]he conflict between Trump administration officials and Senate Republicans on money for testing and other priorities is creating a major complication even before bipartisan negotiations get under way. One person involved in the talks said Senate Republicans were seeking to allocate $25 billion for states to conduct testing and contact tracing, but that certain administration officials want to zero out the testing and tracing money entirely. Some White House officials believe they have already approved billions of dollars in assistance for testing and that some of that money remains unspent. Trump and other White House officials have been pushing for states to own more of the responsibility for testing and have objected to creating national standards, at times seeking to minimize the federal government’s role. We all know from where this batshit crazy policy comes. Trump believes that if we don’t test, we don’t have COVID-19 cases. Close your eyes and pretend to make it go away. What this really means is that we are flying blind in an unchecked pandemic that is overwhelming our hospitals. Trump has crossed the line from criminal negligence into willful manslaughter. The next sticking point is Trump’s insistence on a payroll tax cut which takes money from payroll deductions for social security and medicare. Trump demands payroll tax cut in next Covid relief bill. “President Donald Trump has signaled to Hill Republicans that he will not sign a new coronavirus stimulus package without the inclusion of a payroll tax cut, according to three sources close to the issue.” More than 32 million Americans are receiving some form of unemployment benefits. Over 17 million continue to claim traditional unemployment benefits. This number has dropped from its peak at 25 million in early May, but it remains at depression levels. Another roughly 15 million are on the rolls of other unemployment programs, including the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. That’s 32 million unemployed Americans – which does not include many more Americans who have applied for unemployment but have not yet qualified – for whom a payroll tax deduction is meaningless. They are not receiving a paycheck. They need direct financial assistance to survive, to keep a roof over their head, and to feed their families. Most of the expansion of benefits — applies only to benefit weeks that end “on or before July 31.” July 31 is a Friday.

On July 25 or 26, and millions of workers will see their incomes plunge 60 percent or more just a few days from now.

A new plan from Senate Republicans to award businesses, schools, and universities sweeping exemptions from lawsuits arising from inadequate coronavirus safeguards is putting Republicans and Democrats at loggerheads as Congress reconvenes next week to negotiate another relief package. The liability proposal, drafted by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and senior Republican John Cornyn of Texas, promises to shield employers when customers and workers are exposed to coronavirus by moving lawsuits to federal court and limiting legal liability to acts of “gross negligence or intentional misconduct,” according to a draft of the plan obtained by The Associated Press. McConnell has said for months that some form of liability shield will be in the next COVID response measure, telling an audience in Kentucky on Wednesday that he won’t send the next, and fifth, coronavirus response bill to the floor without it.

Continue reading “GOP House Leader Makes Dire Prediction For New Coronavirus Stimulus Bill”

Trump Says U.S. Has Lowest Infection Rate And Death Rate In The World

I say, bullshit. This is an issue that we’re going to have to deal with and get it right because everything depends on this. I’ll do my job, you do yours.

If ‘stupid’ crowds and business owners continue to ignore social distancing rules despite hospitalizations reaching their lowest since March 18

• Bars and restaurants in New York City can service people on an outdoor basis
• But Cuomo said on Monday too many were ignoring social distancing rules
• Large crowds continue to gather at some bars, and the NYPD is refusing to intervene
• Cuomo said he’d roll back the reopening and close all bars if it continues
• The hospitality industry was crippled by the 14-week closure
• Many were put out of business entirely and others are open but can’t pay rent
• The infection rate among those tested in NYC is now 1.3% and Brooklyn and Manhattan have the lowest rates
• Hospitalizations are down to their lowest across NY state – 716 – since March 18

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has threatened to reverse New York City’s reopening plan and close all bars and restaurants because too many are allowing large groups to gather. The infection rate of people tested in New York City is now just 1.3 percent, with Brooklyn (0.9 percent) and Manhattan (1.1 percent) showing lower numbers than any other borough. Statewide, hospitalizations have fallen to their lowest since March 18 – 716 – and the three-day average of the number of people dying every day is now 11. Despite the encouraging numbers, Cuomo says there are still too many young people, particularly in the city, flouting social distancing rules. They are ‘reckless and stupid’, he said, but the bar and restaurant owners who are allowing them to gather and the cops who are turning a blind eye to them are also to blame. Bars and restaurants in New York City were finally allowed to offer outdoor service on June 22 after an excruciating, 14-week closure that crippled the economy and put many out of business. Indoor dining is indefinitely postponed, due in part to the huge surge in cases being seen in other states where it was allowed to resume. On Monday, Cuomo warned: ‘We cannot allow those congregations to continue. ‘If it happens… I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. ‘We will have to roll back the bar and restaurant opening if the congregations continue, if the local governments don’t stop it, that is what is going to happen. ‘One plus one still equals two,’ he said. He showed photos of crowds at bars in Astoria, Queens, and on the Lower East Side as examples, but large gatherings have been seen all over the city. Statewide: 1.05% positive of 49,342 people tested positive (519). Bars and restaurants were allowed to resume outdoor dining on June 22. Many had been offering take-out throughout the pandemic which created a problem of people gathering in streets with drinks. Last week, Cuomo tightened the rules.

Six months after the coronavirus appeared in America, the nation has failed spectacularly to contain it. The country’s ineffective response has shocked observers around the planet. Many countries have rigorously driven infection rates nearly to zero. In the United States, coronavirus transmission is out of control. The national response is fragmented, shot through with political rancor and culture-war divisiveness. Testing shortcomings that revealed themselves in March have become acute in July, with week-long waits for results leaving the country blind to real-time virus spread and rendering contact tracing nearly irrelevant.

© Provided by The Washington Post

The United States may be heading toward a new spasm of wrenching economic shutdowns or to another massive spike in preventable deaths from covid-19 — or both.

How the world’s richest country got into this dismal situation is a complicated tale that exposes the flaws and fissures in a nation long proud of its ability to meet cataclysmic challenges. The fumbling of the virus was not a fluke: The American coronavirus fiasco has exposed the country’s incoherent leadership, self-defeating political polarization, a lack of investment in public health, and persistent socioeconomic and racial inequities that have left millions of people vulnerable to disease and death.In this big, sprawling, demographically and culturally diverse nation, the decentralized political structures gave birth to patchwork policies that don’t make sense when applied to a virus that ignores state boundaries and city limits.

While other countries endured some of the same setbacks, few have suffered from all of them simultaneously and catastrophically. If there was a mistake to be made in this pandemic, America has made it.

The single biggest miscalculation was rushing to reopen the economy while the virus was still spreading at high rates through much of the country, experts say. The only way to reopen safely, epidemiologists said as far back as early April, was to “crush the curve” — to drive down the rate of viral transmission to the point that new infections were few and far between. Many countries did just that. The United States did not follow the expert advice. Now, the curve is crushing America. “We didn’t have the stick-to-itiveness, the determination, to carry through what we started in March, April and May, and now the virus is taking advantage of that,” National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said. “If we’d had really strong guidance from local, state and national leaders, maybe we could have sustained the determination to get the curve all the way down to zero,” he said. “Now, we’re on the upswing, and I don’t quite see the top of the upswing yet.” Other countries have managed to avoid the kind of dramatic viral resurgence that is happening in America. Spain, Italy, Germany and France — all devastated by the virus months ago — drove coronavirus cases and deaths to relatively low levels. The United Kingdom has been an outlier in Europe, with one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world, but after suppressing transmission, it has not seen a major rebound. And in Asia, the picture is radically different. In Taiwan, baseball fans sit in the stands and watch their teams play. Japan has had fewer than 1,000 deaths from covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. South Korea has had fewer than 300. Vietnam has recorded no deaths from the virus. The death rate from covid-19 in the United States looks like that of countries with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources and technological infrastructure.