Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Not all heroes wear capes.

This blog will pay for itself.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Bark louder, little dog.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

I really should read my own blog.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Monday/Tuesday, April 6/7

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Monday/Tuesday, April 6/7

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Be very interesting to see something like this implemented, though:

… Lisa D. Cook, a Michigan State University economist who worked in the Obama White House, said lawmakers should consider funneling $1,500 a month to individuals through mobile apps like Zelle in order to reach more people, particularly low-income and nonwhite Americans who disproportionately lack traditional bank accounts. Mobile payments, Ms. Cook said, would also make it “easier and faster to make onward payments to family members and friends in need.”…

IANAn economist, but I agree that getting money into the hands of the people who need it most, and who’ll spread it around most swiftly, is of prime importance at the current moment. (Yes, of course it won’t happen until the current Oval Office Occupant is booted.)


Reader Interactions

38Comments

  1. 1.

    mrmoshpotato

    Why haven’t all of the Ammosexual Bundy clan been thrown into a briar patch yet?

    Every Chinese national and person of Chinese descent should be allowed to put their boot up Lindsay’s Southern shitbag belle ass.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    Has anyone asked Trump to justify his PPE distribution policy, in particular seizing equipment bought and paid for by states like Massachusetts and even by other nations?

  4. 4.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @mrmoshpotato: As much as I am amazed to agree with Graham on anything; the CCP needs to shamed by the world what their arrogance created.

    Fun fact, the CCP allowed the Wet Markets to reopen.  This will the the third time the CCP after those Wet Markets were the source of a pandemic.

  5. 5.

    SFAW

    @MagdaInBlack:

    “That’s a nasty question. Why can’t you ask nice questions? ”

    “Mr. Presi — I mean, Your Highness, can you, with your brilliant mind — even smarter than the genius Vizzini! — please explain why your son-in-law should not be put in front of a firing squad for war profiteering? Or, for that matter why you — although your Massive Mushroom would protect — should not get the same treatment? I ask that with the utmost respect, because I am in awe of your greatness.”

    Think it might work?

    ETA: Possible alternative: “That Mooslim Usurper who was the so-called ‘President’ before you, could never seem to make any money from war profiteering, even though he tried. Are you able to describe to us how much better you and Jared — well, just you, really, but we need to pretend Jared’s involved — have succeeded at war profiteering, and keeping much-needed PPE and other critical supplies from those whiny-ass states that might need them?”

  6. 6.

    MagdaInBlack

    @SFAW:

    ..and also, Sir, may I just add that your hair looks fantastic today.

    Is that a new shade of orange? You’re positively glowing! Sir!

  7. 7.

    SFAW

    Should the media start referring to Jared as “the war criminal Jared Kushner”? Since his father-in-law might view it as a means to get him out of the way, vis-a-vis Ivanka.

  11. 11.

    SFAW

    @MagdaInBlack:

    ..and also, Sir, may I just add that your hair looks fantastic today.

    I don’t know, I think that might be a bridge too far, but …

    Although I guess the nasty/horrid/evil/fake news reporter could ask if he was the body double for Chris Evans in Captain America, which is more over-the-top than yours.

  13. 13.

    debbie

    Every damn Rethuglican in Wisconsin needs to pay for their venality. I hope people will vote however they can, but if they can’t, I hope they remember this in November.

    All of them need to end up alongside BoJo in their casual disregard for the safety of their fellow citizens.

  14. 14.

    WereBear

    On a cheerful note, my decision to flee Florida for New York as a young adult has never seemed more incredibly prescient.

  16. 16.

    debbie

    @Amir Khalid:

    Why ask? It’s what he does. What should be asked is why the states aren’t vociferously pushing back against this criminality?

  17. 17.

    SFAW

    @debbie:

    What should be asked is why the states aren’t vociferously pushing back against this criminality?

    Because they know what the response will be — a complete shut-off, maybe even confiscation of already-present PPE — and that none of the Traitor Party members in the Senate would hold the Murderer-in-Chief to account.

  18. 18.

    debbie

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:

    Disagree. This is racism. It’s human stupidity, not arrogance that got us here. I suppose if you could go back in time, you would beat Typhoid Mary to a bloody pulp with stones?

    The problem, as we can see with our dear leader, is the over-focus on commerce. That’s why the CCP was less than forthcoming: They didn’t want to fuck up their economic position. Trump’s trying to do the same right now.

  19. 19.

    SFAW

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Every Chinese national and person of Chinese descent should be allowed to put their boot up Lindsay’s Southern shitbag belle ass

    Fixed

  21. 21.

    SFAW

    @Robert Sneddon:

    Besides, that would violate the Second Amendment: “The right of NRA adherents to sell as many and as powerful external death penises* as they can shall not be infringed.”

     

    *First saw that descriptor at Atrios’s place, many years ago, but I don’t know if he originated it.

  22. 22.

    WereBear

    @Robert Sneddon: Millions of Americans hunt and eat wildlife.

     
    Yes, as supervised by local authorities. In NY, the DEC monitors the health of species, controls permits, and issues advisories.

    None of that is going on in the wet markets which are ruled by superstition and the whims of the rich. It’s really two different things.

    Also, everyone who has read The Hot Zone can grasp the incredible short-sighted stupidity of allowing native monkeys to be kidnapped out of their jungles for labs, when we had a working system that was much more safe and humane. W got rid of that.

    Now, it’s akin to letting outlaws gather rats in NYC for labs, keeping them in unsafe and unhygienic conditions, and retriggering all kinds of plagues.

    As we have seen.

  23. 23.

    debbie

    @WereBear:

    I am convinced this whole sorry episode is Karma magnified. Even BoJo’s predicament is karma. Pity the lessons won’t be learned.

  24. 24.

    Gvg

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: no we should NOT call out the Chinese, because our own governments response has made things so much worse, and this group is incapable of realizing any mistakes and correcting course. I would bet that the US’s actions have actually caused more worldwide deaths than the Chinese initial coverup.

    A normal US administration could say some chiding things, but not this one and the next one is going to have to be careful.

    i hate Trump and I despise the idiots that vote for a party that has for years been going towards disrespect for all knowledge and expertise. That’s how we got in this position.

  25. 25.

    Anne Laurie

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: Fun fact, the CCP allowed the Wet Markets to reopen. This will the the third time the CCP after those Wet Markets were the source of a pandemic.

    As I understand it, those dangerous ‘wild caught’ wet markets are primarily for well-to-do elites who want to impress each other with their expensive / exotic tastes.  So, it would be like insisting America’s upper-end golf resorts are ‘essential businesses’…

  26. 26.

    WereBear

    @debbie:

    Pity the lessons won’t be learned.

    When being exempt from your own stupidity is the entire point of being a Republican? As if!

    @Anne Laurie: Yes, it’s the very rich competing for who can be the biggest asshole, which is What They Do.

    I was not aware of just how this informs their entire worldview until I read a true crime book set in the Hong Kong/expat/investment banker world.

    The men work 80 hour weeks and buy expensive toys and mistresses as compensation. The women shop like it’s a competitive sport. Both of them are caught up in ceaseless one-up-manship via consumer baubles. Children are raised by servants and are just another competitive sport.

    I was shocked at how blatant and unvaried it was. The only people who have a clue are the servants, which includes their employment underlings. Many have their lives destroyed, heedlessly, as a result.

  27. 27.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: The issue is consumption (for food or medicinal purposes) and trafficking of wild life, not wet markets, per se. Your local farmer’s markets and seafood wholesale markets are wet markets. Wet markets are how a large percentage of people across E/SE/S Asia (including Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore), Africa and Latin America get their food, due to shortage of refrigeration and preference for fresh foodstuff. It’s not like factory farming is much better. SARS and (possibly) COVID-19 came from wild life stalls in Chinese wet markets, but MERS came from live animal markets in either Jordan or Saudia Arabia, H1N1 Swine Flu came from Smithfield owned pig farms in Mexico (and blew up via the US). It is thought that the “Spanish” Flu originated from pig farms in Kansas. With SARS, MERS and H1N1, the world simply lucked out in that the viruses are either very virulent but not very infectious, or very infectious but not very virulent. There is a reason Dr, Bruce Aylward, who led the Joint WHO-China Mission in Feb., called SARS-CoV-2 the “Wayne Gretzky” of viruses. And he has seen them all. The world’s luck finally ran out.

    So, wet markets and factory farms need to be tightly regulated around the world. Trafficking and consumption of wildlife life (including wild game) should be banned or heavily regulated. Especially as human habitats are increasing encroaching upon wild life habitats.

    The CCP is culpable for allowing regulation of trafficking of wild life to be relaxed, in the decades after the end of the SARS epidemic. However, to myopically focus on the CCP regime’s failings is to ignore all the other potential risk vectors – such as pig farms and poultry farms. The next swine or avian flu may surprise the world yet again, and these flu viruses are much more prone to mutation than corona viruses.

  28. 28.

    Ian R

    @YY_Sima Qian: Absolutely. We shouldn’t pretend that the reason the pandemic didn’t start here is anything but blind luck. As long as humans eat and associate with animals, there will be spillover infections.

  29. 29.

    Ohio Mom

    I hope someone is tallying all the extra money the equipment bidding wars are costing the states.

    This unnecessary expense is going to help decimate all state services and programs, and also those of schools and local governments, which get a lot of funding from their states. They are already reeling from the loss of sales taxes.

    Funny, I don’t hear any of the usual suspects screaming about government waste, fraud and abuse.

  30. 30.

    Soprano2

    I heard a report on NPR this morning about how black people are disproportionately dying from the virus, and it makes me wonder once again if the reason the administration ignored this for so long is that they thought it would only kill “those people” in the cities who don’t vote for Trump anyway. I still think it was Florida’s governor who finally got Trump to take it seriously, by impressing on Trump that his voters were also at risk.

    Then they had on that Republican senator Bill Cassidy from LA who’s a doctor, with no one to push back on the crap he said about how he did too support Medicaid expansion and helping poor people access health care.

  31. 31.

    Ben Cisco

    @WaterGirl: Negative.  Turns out my allergies went into overdrive and I was having difficulty breathing.  Took the test, which came back yesterday (negative). Helpful since Sec. Mnuchin his own self deemed me part of the critical infrastructure of the country.  Yay me!

  32. 32.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Just some additional context: the South China Seafood Market in Wuhan is actually a major wholesale market for seafood, but also turns over other meats. It’s owner once boasted that  if the market is ever shut down, half of the restaurants and hotels in Wuhan would have empty pantries. The market is known to locals as a place for cheap but good quality seafood. Apparently the exotic wildlife is sold at stalls hidden around the periphery. There have been rumors that the owner of the market was well connected to members of district, municipal and even provincial leadership, which is probably why the authorities turned a blind eye to illicit activities there.

    It has since came to light that Wuhan is the center for trafficking of wildlife for all of central China, due to Wuhan’s central location and logistical links, not so much local demand. This has came as a huge surprise to most residents of Wuhan. My wife and her family have lived in Wuhan all their lives, but they never knew that wild life was sold here in quantity, or that anyone ate wild caught animals.

    I will admit that I have tried more than my share of exotic (at least in the eyes of most Americans) things during my time in China, but they have all been farmed. I am strongly against wild life poaching, there aren’t that many wild animals to be hunted in China to begin with, and trafficking wild life is illegal under most circumstances in China. True hunted or caught wild life is extremely rare in China, are quite expensive, and only cater to a small niche among the wealthy. They are now universally despised in China.

    It is still yet to be proven whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus crossed from animals to humans at the seafood market, and the intermediate host is still in clear (possibly pangolins). The market is clearly the first cluster, but three of five initial patients had no connection to the market. On the other hand, this is somewhat academic. The root cause is humans (and the animals they raise and traffic) have been encroaching deeper and closer to bat habitats in China and across SE Asia, and bats are a huge reservoir of corona viruses. Pangolins are trafficked from Malaysia to China for the supposed medicinal properties of their scales (this is the sketchy side of TCM). Pangolins have been all but hunted to extinction in China. Not sure if the pangolins from Malaysia are caught or farmed.

  33. 33.

    Geminid

    @Soprano2: One thing Virginia Governor Ralph Northam accomplished his first year was Medicaid expansion. The republicans still had majorities in both houses of the General Assembly, but three republican senators and enough delegates “defected” to put it through. A couple of the delegates fell to primaries, but my republican state senator, Emmitt Hanger, crushed a challenger whose campaign ads showed her packing a pistol. Her supporters did not help her cause when they leafleted the cars at his Church of the Brethren parking lot during services. People in the Shenandoah Valley are generally conservative, but they are not radical, and they hate crap like that.

  35. 35.

    WereBear

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    The CCP is culpable for allowing regulation of trafficking of wild life to be relaxed, in the decades after the end of the SARS epidemic. However, to myopically focus on the CCP regime’s failings is to ignore all the other potential risk vectors – such as pig farms and poultry farms. The next swine or avian flu may surprise the world yet again, and these flu viruses are much more prone to mutation than corona viruses.

     
    Agreed. This is a world wide problem.

  36. 36.

    VOR

    @Anne Laurie: Fun fact, in both Wisconsin and Minnesota there are initiatives asking the Governor to re-open the golf courses. They claim the golfers will be obedient social distancers.

  37. 37.

    JDM

    “For all you New Yorkers, farms are where the food you eat comes from. Farmers could use more of your praise and less of your condescending scorn.”

     

    yep, no condescending scorn there.  I will follow your example, Mr. Lawson, as per the Golden Rule.

  38. 38.

    Emma

    BTW, Jay Inslee announced yesterday that our schools are closed through the end of the school year.

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