USA Politics

It depends on messaging and disinformation campaigns. The level of ignorance on Covid is really stunning (some of that is displayed on this forum even).

Florida is especially interesting. They are not taking the situation seriously at all. It's also a state that Trump needs to win and he is probably heavily favored there. The size of the elderly population there helps.
 
Mosh said:
It depends on messaging and disinformation campaigns. The level of ignorance on Covid is really stunning (some of that is displayed on this forum even).

Florida is especially interesting. They are not taking the situation seriously at all. It's also a state that Trump needs to win and he is probably heavily favored there. The size of the elderly population there helps.
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On the other hand, despite lockdown, beaches in CA pretty crowded too. No one will know how this affects the election until it is over .. right now the election is pretty much on hold
 
In Colorado, national parks and hiking trails are pretty popular now. I've gone on a couple of hikes myself but haven't really seen any large groups.

bearfan said:
No one will know how this affects the election until it is over .. right now the election is pretty much on hold
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That kind of plays to my point. An election on hold advantages the incumbent party.
 
Mosh said:
In Colorado, national parks and hiking trails are pretty popular now. I've gone on a couple of hikes myself but haven't really seen any large groups.
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The weather has been pretty crappy here .. ton of rain, so think most people would have been inside anyway. I had a doctor's appointment today (unrelated to COVID) ... was weird driving down there, looked like Christmas Day with most everything closed. Did stop for donuts on the way back ...
 
6.5 million people have applied for unemployment benefits in the US last week. Numbers are expected to continue to explode.

And this is only laid off workers. Doesn't say anything about freelancers.
 
Interesting article


Bush in 2005: 'If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare'




Highlights .. we had what seemed to be a good framework in place and Democrats and Republicans alike dropped the ball since 2005.

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In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail -- describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.



"A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said at the time. "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."


Bush set out to spend $7 billion ($AUD 11.67 billion) building out his plan. His cabinet secretaries urged their staffs to take preparations seriously. The government launched a website, www.pandemicflu.gov, that is still in use today. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult to justify the continued funding, staffing and attention


The president recognised that an outbreak was a different kind of disaster than the ones the federal government had been designed to address.



"To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment," Bush said. "In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators masks and protective equipment would be in short supply."



Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time.



"If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunise every American against the pandemic strain," he said.
 
LooseCannon said:
Yes, the same department he built and Obama added to, Trump shuttered.

Good job.
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Not really ...department was there, but not really funded ... in fact supplies were taken out and never replenished during swine flu and some natural disasters. I know everyone wants to throw this all on Trump, who clearly could have done better ... but we were not ready for this under Obama either

Congress and the last few administrations failed miserably in one of the few legitimate functions (IMO) of the Feds. I get the "blame whoever" part of this .. because sadly that is just the world we live in .. but this is a failure of government for years no matter who was in charge of what .. Trump just carried on the tradition.

Here is a link to a fact check explaining the lack of masks for example (the ventilators were never stockpiled to start with .. no funding). Obama added people and expenses but forgot the actual equipment that would be needed.

www.usatoday.com

Fact check: Did the Obama administration deplete the federal stockpile of N95 masks?

During the presidency of Barack Obama, the national stockpile was seriously taxed as the administration addressed multiple crises over eight years.
www.usatoday.com

Bottom Line

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During the presidency of Barack Obama, the national stockpile was seriously taxed as the administration addressed multiple crises over eight years. About "75 percent of N95 respirators and 25 percent of face masks contained in the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile (∼100 million products) were deployed for use in health care settings over the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response," according to a 2017 study in the journal Health Security.

Again according to NIH, the stockpile's resources were also used during hurricanes Alex, Irene, Isaac and Sandy. Flooding in 2010 in North Dakota also called for stockpile funds to be deployed. The 2014 outbreaks of the ebola virus and botulism, as well as the 2016 outbreak of the zika virus, continued to significantly tax the stockpile with no serious effort from the Obama administration to replenish the fund.


There is no indication that the Obama administration took significant steps to replenish the supply of N95 masks in the Strategic National Stockpile after it was depleted from repeated crises. Calls for action came from experts at the time concerned for the country’s ability to respond to future serious pandemics. Such recommendations were, for whatever reason, not heeded.
 
Guess if we want to add some more facts "the fired the team and defunded"

Kinda, but not really .. but I will go back to my prior point that the equipment needed was not there and not replenished by the Obama Administration. Having a team with institutional knowledge would have helped for sure, but without the equipment available to deploy, would have not been all that much more effective.

A full on failure of government across multiple administrations ..and Congresses

Full details

www.politifact.com

Did Donald Trump fire pandemic officials, defund CDC?

During a CNN town hall before the South Carolina primary, Mike Bloomberg — a former New York City mayor and Democratic p
www.politifact.com www.politifact.com

Summary

  • “Fired” may be a little strong, but in 2018, top national security officials handling pandemics left abruptly and were not replaced by the Trump administration.
  • As for funding, there’s no question that the Trump administration sought to cut key CDC budget categories. But thanks to Congress, that funding was restored and even increased in bills that Trump ultimately signed.
 
Diesel 11 said:
Sanders is out. Good luck with beating Trump now.
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With the Trump bump to the economy wiped out, and erratic, fact-challenged “leadership” on display during a major crisis, people may not be as motivated to run out and re-elect him. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, Democrats are now on record complaining about elections being kept on schedule during a crisis (see their complaints about the election in Wisconsin), so they’ve opened the door to Trump trying to delay the presidential election if he decides his poll numbers haven’t gone up enough yet, and there’s any kind of second viral wave he can point to at the time.
 
Jer said:
Unfortunately, Democrats are now on record complaining about elections being kept on schedule during a crisis (see their complaints about the election in Wisconsin), so they’ve opened the door to Trump trying to delay the presidential election if he decides his poll numbers haven’t gone up enough yet, and there’s any kind of second viral wave he can point to at the time.
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The rhetoric is focused on making mail in voting a possibility. The problem wasn't that Wisconsin had the election, it's that they didn't have the infrastructure to hold an election remotely. This needs to happen now in order for it to be possible in November.

The candidate doesn't matter anymore. This whole election is going to be 100% about Covid and how people perceive Trump's response. If anything, Biden is a better candidate right now because he represents stability.
 
His entire campaign has been centered around a return to normalcy. It was successful enough to win him the nomination, we will see if it works in a general. Good luck arguing that his opponent is mentally stable.
 
One of the pro-Bernie people at work keeps arguing that Joe's grip on reality is starting to slip, and I have some limited sympathy for this. He's definitely got a meandering flow of words. But he always did, too, like back in the day, he was a babbler. Is it worse? Maybe, I'm not going to go listen to hours of Joe Biden rallies and speeches to find out, either, but it's important to note that he has always been a babbler.

Here's what I know: I believe that Biden's cabinet would tell him when it's time to resign if the cheese slips off the cracker. I don't think he's got a strong enough personality around which to form a cult, unlike the Donald. I am not saying they'd 25th Amendment him, but I am saying they might gently suggest that he resign or not run for re-election (depending on when in his term that may or may not come to pass).

Also, he won't gut the EPA, won't appoint anti-gay, anti-abortion judges to the Supreme Court, won't appoint unqualified yes-men to cabinet, and almost certainly won't insist that a pandemic will go away like a miracle even as cases begin to spread in the USA. So you know...there's all of that.
 
I also don’t really buy the whole “Biden is mentally unstable” argument, but I’m at a loss on how to argue that. People are going to see what they want to see and won’t be convinced otherwise. For me, there are once again two options to choose from and I will go for what I perceive is the better option. If Bernie supporters think Trump is a better outcome than Biden, by all means vote for Trump or stay home. But that is the choice.
 
Allow me to present the reason to vote for Joe Biden in a single picture:

800px-Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg_2016_portrait.jpg


That is all.
 
It's really maddening that Democrats learned absolutely nothing from the 2016 election. Their campaign will yet again be focused on not being Trump and nothing else. Their only shot at winning is hoping that the swing states, especially those in the Rust Belt, who bought Trump's rhetoric and saw him as a beacon of hope move to the other side after being disillusioned. I'm skeptical of that, since Biden doesn't represent anything new for them.

Bernie would've appealed to the Trump voters in those regions more due to his populist, more working class friendly platform. Biden performed better in those states in the primaries, but the point is about winning over the Trump voters, not merely retaining the Clinton voters. Trump's perceived relative economic protectionism and "appeal to the common man" was decisive in states where manufacturing jobs drive the economy, Biden represents the opposite of economic protectionism, much like Clinton.

That being said and as much as I dislike Biden and what he represents, I do hope he wins the election over Trump. There are many issues in which Trump's presence constitutes a great global threat - climate change being a major one. Then there also are the issues LC pointed out above.
 
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